Game Changer - TV Tropes

"Welcome to Game Changer, the only game show where the game changes every show!"

The only way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning, and the only way to begin is by beginning. So without further ado, let's begin by describing Game Changer here.

Game Changer is a Game Show on independent streaming service Dropout. Each episode, host Sam Reich has three comedians play a game, with the caveat that they (usually) don't know what they're about to play until they start playing.

Most episodes are unrelated to each other, making the show almost a game show anthology series. Certain concepts have proven successful enough to get "Game Samers", where the same game is played again, either with the same players (like 'Make Some Noise') or with different ones (like 'Sam Says'). Three concepts have been so successful that they got their own spinoff shows, Make Some Noise (under the same name), Never Have I Ever (as Dirty Laundry) and The Official Cast Recording (as Play it By Ear).

Games that have gotten at least one Game Samer 

Game Changer includes examples of:

• Adaptational Badass: Played for laughs with "Six confronts Seven about eating Nine". Literally all we knew about Six in the original joke was that he was afraid of Seven "Because Seven ate Nine". In the sketch, while still clearly terrified, Six is brave enough to confront and even threaten Seven for what they did.
• Affectionate Parody:
  • "Survivor" and its "Battle Royale" sequel series are direct parodies of Survivor.
  • "The Bachelor" parodies the reality show of the same name.
  • "Second Place"'s minigames are all parodies of existing game shows: "The Price is Not Quite", "Family Two'd", and "Deux or No Deux".
  • "Ratfish" sees cast members (and Eric Wareheim) playing The Circle (2018).
  • Also in "Ratfish", one of the players chooses to play as "Brennan Lee Mulligan". The real Brennan, who's also in the episode, is not amused.
• And You Thought It Was Real: Occasionally stops called by the crew or things told to the cast "off-screen" are actually part of the game.
  • In "Beat the Buzzer", we're shown a clip of a pre-shoot announcement to please not touch a cake on the table of snacks for the cast and crew, since it's for an employee named Justin's birthday later. The cake actually has a buzzer hidden inside of it.
  • In "Sam Says 3", after a prompt to protect Sam from the paparazzi that results in Sam's mic getting knocked off, a sound tech calls for a hold to check everyone's microphones. Sam asks Lou, Jake, and Vic to give him a quick mic test... then takes points away from all of them because he didn't say "Sam Says" first.
  • Nearing the end of "Sam Says 3", one of the prompts is simply "Sam says 'Party!'", to which the players are invited to the Dropout parking lot, where they find a party bus and many of their friends aboard. What follows is a montage of everyone sincerely enjoying themselves with drinks, laughs, and good times aboard... until the camera dramatically zooms in a sign inside the bus that all of the players failed to notice, revealing that all of the rules of the game are still in effect. When the trio return to set, their points get slashed substantially for failing to realize they were still in the game.
• Artistic License – Geography: In "A Game Most Changed," Count Chocula offers to release Google to the Pacific or Atlantic ocean. Given that the story takes place in Verona, it'd be a rather long overland trip to either of those oceans, and it'd be easier to release him in the Adriatic sea or Lake Garda.
• Ascended Meme: The once-popular meme of “Evil Sam Reich”, consisting of edited pictures of Sam with a top hat and a mustache, was the inspiration for Samuel Dalton, Sam’s evil tophat-wearing great-grandfather who plays the role of the antagonist in "Escape the Greenroom".
• Badass Boast: In the Season Six episode "Second Place", when Brennan declares his intention to not engage with the premise of the episode, where Sam intends for the players to score points by aiming for second place in each challenge.

  Brennan: ..but I'm gonna tell you this right now. If the goal of this game is to be middle, I'm gonna lose so fucking hard it's gonna blow your fucking mind.

• Bait-and-Switch: In "Jeopardy", the day’s game is stated to be Jeopardy!. Deceptively simple for a Game Changer game, but not completely unheard of. Then, when the players select the questions on the board, pirate ships sail to those location. After the first round, the game is revealed to be a tabletop pirate adventure game themed around Jeopardy.
• Batman Gambit:
  • The "do a Donald Trump impression" prompt in "Second Place". Brennan realizes he'll be the second to go on this particular prompt, his Trump impression is great, and if he plays it straight he'll do the best and therefore not win the points for doing the second best. Rather than try to beat Ally's attempt, Brennan goes wildly off the rails to do worse than them, which sets up Oscar to do one even worse. When Sam tries to call him out for trying not to win, Brennan argues that he was simply manipulating the Rule of Three.

    Brennan: Look, you have to do us all in a row, but we're comedians. So whatever the second person does creates the second point in a line which creates a pattern. The third person can't resist their comedic impulses to build off the first two points of information. I knew if I did one better than Ally, they would win, because Oscar would want to put a tail on it!

  • During "Battle Royale Pt. 4", Vic managed to get Ally voted off, despite them having protection from being voted off, by correctly predicting that Ally would use their protection on another player. Since it was later in the game and multiple players were about to be voted off in one round, all it took was getting Jacob on their side to coordinate a big enough vote. They also correctly predicted that they themselves were a target and managed to get Jacob to play his own immunity loop-de-loop on them.
  • When crafting their personas during "Ratfish (Part 1)", Brennan designed his character to evoke Rekha's sense of humour, counting on everybody to pick up on her idiosyncrasies and assume that he was her, and basically the only person not shown falling for this was Rekha herself.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: At the end of the "Whodunnit" episode, the unmasked murderer attempts to cap off the Motive Rant by taking the murder weapon off one of the contestants and committing suicide with it, only to be reminded that the knife Rekha was holding was the retractible prop knife, not the real murder weapon.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • Since host Sam Reich is also the CEO of Dropout, the cast's frequent berating of him ends up as this.
  • One of the letters in "Don't Cry" ends with Mike Trapp lamenting that his chance to give that speech was on a streaming service behind a paywall.
  • "The Newlywed Game": To break up the players's internet histories being read off, Sam's wife Elaine Carroll comes out to read some of his embarrassing Twitter drafts and Google search history.
  • In "One Year Later", one of the challenges is to create the most creative voicemail recording, which Jacob, Vic, and Lou accomplish by way of High School Marching Band, Full Musical, and Gospel Choir respectively, as Sam begins his critiques to hand out points, the contestants warn him that he's about to offend 90 per cent of the Dropout user base.
• Bound and Gagged: In "Escape the Greenroom", Sam is found tied up in the bathroom with a gag over his mouth.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • One challenge in "Second Place" asked the players to Venmo money to Katie Marovitch.
  • "Deja Vu" has a challenge that explicitly asks the players to bribe Sam with cash in their podiums. Siobhan takes it a step further by using the cash in her podium to bribe the people running other challenges.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Brennan Lee Mulligan, who Sam himself refers to, affectionately, as his favorite torture victim. At least two episodes have been explicitly rigged against him (although he was an emergency standby for one of them after Grant tested positive for Covid upon arriving to set), and the more competitive games almost always involve the other players acting against him even when he isn’t winning.
  • Grant O'Brien. "Race to the Bottom" ends with him getting slapped by every cast and crew member who wanted to and "Like My Coffee..." features Grant's favorite porn star as a special guest for a minigame. "Like My Coffee 2" takes it even further by bringing in Grant's mom. To his credit, he does occasionally seem kind of into it, frequently choosing to make things weirder for everyone else than it is for him.
  • Lily Du, at times. During the Season 3 episodes "Never Have I Ever," where she is forced to tell two incredibly embarrassing stories, and "20/20 Vision," where Lily is "mentally tortured" by her inability to recall when certain historical events happened because she is younger than the other players. It all worked out in the end because she ended up hosting Dirty Laundry, the individual show based on "Never Have I Ever."
  • Raphael Chestang sometimes, especially in "Secret Samta 3". He is forced to change into a Sia costume (namely the leotard from the Chandelier music video), gets splashed with color, and is forced to post a sonogram on his social media.

    Raphael: [after finally winning a prize, wearing a Sia wig, a leotard, and covered in colored powder] This is what winning looks like.

  • Lou Wilson in the "Sam Says" episodes.
• Call-Back:
  • When Sam introduces the players on stage he often references previous work they have done on CollegeHumor/Dropout, such as Brennan as the DM of Dimension 20, or Ally and Grant being the contestants on Total Forgiveness.
  • In the Season 1 epsiode "Game of Prizes", Raph repeatedly refers to twists in the game as "loop-de-loops". Jess points out the looping design pattern of the Game Changer set and jokes that "the loop-de-loops have been here the whole time". Over two years later, during the first Survivor episode, it is revealed that the game's version of immunity idols are loop-de-loops in the shape of the very same design.
  • During Lou's montage in "Sam Says 3," the text on Jacob's "screen" references his DIY buzzer noises from Make Some Noise.
  • The card Sam picks and Vic eventually produces for their card trick in "One Year Later" is the six of diamonds, the same card in the setup for "Escape the Greenroom".
• The Cameo: Several celebrities and Internet creators make brief appearances.
  • In “Deja Vu”, the YouTuber FixItMan78 is played by SungWon Cho, whereas Brian David Gilbert appears as the Podium Inspector.
  • Many web creators cameo in "One Year Later" due to how collaborative the challenges became. These include but are not limited to Angela Giarratana, Jon Matteson, and Zach Kornfeld.
• Character Filibuster: Brennan Lee Mulligan does this on almost every episode he's featured in. "Second Place" sees him go off on no less than four separate tangential rants.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In the "Whodunnit" episode, a real knife was swapped out for the retractable prop knife, turning a fake murder into a real murder. Grant and Rekha find the prop knife in the Returns bin and screw around with it a little bit before mostly forgetting about it as they continue to investigate. Then Grant is unmasked as the murderer and grabs the knife to underline a dramatic Motive Rant. Everyone acts like it's an actual knife, until Grant stabs himself and remembers it's a retractible plastic blade.
  • The “upside-down” compass rose in "Jeopardy". Most of the players assume it’s simply a map decoration, and don’t even notice that it’s “upside-down” (in the sense that north is pointing down instead of the usual up). As it turns out, working together to flip the compass is the way to win the game.
  • The boxes in "Deja Vu". Initially, the purpose of the question “point or box” is unclear, as choosing “box” results in a missed opportunity for a point. But once the game loops, the players realize that they’ve run out of rubber ducks for the “give me a duck” question. A high-up shelf next to the podiums contains many rubber ducks, and it can only be reached by stacking boxes from multiple loops.
• Coitus Uninterruptus: "Beat the Buzzer" has players scrambling to find buzzers hidden all across the studio. One buzzer is hidden behind a pair of college students furiously making out in a college dorm room set. They do not stop hooking up at any point, not even when Becca awkwardly tries to reach past them to reach the button. The behind the scenes video reveals that they continued making out after their button had already been pushed, leading the crew to wonder if they knew they were allowed to stop.
• Competition Freak: Brennan has become iconic for his extreme competitiveness, to the point where an entire episode was dedicated to forcing him to lose just to see his reaction.
• Cringe Comedy:
  • "Sleeper Agents" requires the players to talk to total strangers scattered around the studio and peppering them with a list of strange (and sometimes flirty) activation phrases. It is astonishingly awkward. (The vast majority of the people seem to be in on it even if they aren't actually sleeper agents, but they do a really good job of acting like they have nothing to do with the show.)
  • One of the prompts in "Sam Says 3" is "Do something cringe." Vic corners Sam and desperately begs him to give them a dollar, Jacob does a Jar-Jar Binks impression, and Lou tries to do a cartwheel. They are all awarded points.
  • Less extreme, but the point of "Ham it Up" is Grant, Christine, and Lou against special guest Giancarlo Esposito trying to seriously act out dialogue at Sam's discretion and direction, where even Sam himself admits the scenes are some of the worst dialogue he's ever written or utilized. As a few examples, Lou has a bunch of half-finished questions followed by saying "wow" about 18 times while being hurtful, Christine has an almost childish interpretation of hands touching as "kissing" or "hugging" each other while being gentle, and Grant outright has lyrics to the children's song "Bingo (B-I-N-G-O)" in "near-to-silent fear". The point of the episode - their performances being rated against Giancarlo's - may also fall under this category depending on how well the three are able to stand on their own or not.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • One puzzle in "Beat the Buzzer" required a "retinal scan" from Izzy Roland, who wasn't on set that day but was standing by to be FaceTimed. Becca eventually bypasses the FaceTime by pulling up a selfie of Izzy from their text history, which Sam points out wasn't the intended way of solving the puzzle, but effective nonetheless.
  • In the episode "Deja Vu", the players are given the prompt "Gimme A Duck", with a bunch of rubber ducks placed on a very high shelf. Shiobhan and Ify eventually figure out that a different prompt, "Point or Box", is meant to help with this, since they can gather boxes and stack them high enough to get to the shelf. Meanwhile, Trapp just runs off to find a ladder.

  Sam: Oh, Trapp, I'm afraid that there's a very-
  Trapp: Oh, you don't like out of the box thinking on Game Changer?!
  Sam: There is a very specific game mechanic in mind that we have to-
  Trapp: Yeah, you want us to stack up the boxes. But guess what? I've got a fucking ladder, and it's way taller!

• Damned by Faint Praise: There are two examples in "Second Place:"
  • A prompt to "give Sam a compliment" results in Ally calling him "the perfect American." Sam isn't sure if he should be offended or flattered, and Brennan notes that there's something weirdly sinister about that statement.
  • In the same episode's conclusion, after Brennan wins on a technicality, Ally calls him "the king of trying just enough" and "the bare minimum king", as a way of needling him for his competitiveness in a game where Hard Work Hardly Works.
• Dance Party Ending: At the end of every cycle of the "Groundhog Day" Loop in "Deja Vu”, Sam does “the wenis,” a dance routine. The players join in Sam’s dance until he kicks over the camera and the next cycle begins. With each cycle, more and more of the crew members join in the dance. In the final cycle, when the camera doesn’t get kicked over, the players, Sam, most of the crew, and even the characters like Roscoe the Creepy Clown join in the dance.
• Dance Sensation: The Wenis from "Deja Vu".

  Everybody do the Wenis!
  The Wenis is a dance
  Everybody is a genius
  Who knows it in advance!

• Defying the Censors: Invoked in "Sam Says", where one of the prompts for the three contestants is "say something we'll have to bleep." The show doesn't censor profanity, leading all three of them come up with different, but effective alternate answers: Brennan starts singing "Hey Jude" knowing the show won't be able to let the audio play for copyright reasons, while Lou, based on his capacity as a paid employee, declares on behalf of the show and Dropout they believe "O.J. didn't do it," naturally requiring a bleep and a disclaimer from Sam (Izzy also gets a point by literally saying "Something we'll have to bleep.")
• Deliberate VHS Quality: After multiple rounds in "Deja Vu", the video and audio quality starts noticeably degrading like a VHS tape would, with tracking lines and static cuts throughout, as part of the whole show breaking down with each cycle.
• Developer's Foresight: In "Do I Hear $1?", the players eventually Take a Third Option and refuse to continue playing on Sam's terms, banding together to deadlock the bidding. Sam has a slide prepared for this congratulating them for unionizing.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: In the episode aptly titled "Second Place", the goal of the game is to be neither the best at a given task nor the worst, but exactly down the middle. Among the players is Brennan Lee Mulligan, well-known for his competitive streak, who finds the game absolutely infuriating. When he ends up winning despite being in second place, he launches into an impassioned speech.

  Brennan: There is nothing wrong with second place. Your best effort is all that anyone's asking for. And, if you give your best and you come in second, you come in third, you come in last, it's not about winning or losing. It's about giving it everything you've got. Now, Sam has built a monument to devilry, and chaos. I deserve second place. I came in second. The only crime that’s been committed here is that Oscar and Ally deserve first. We should be applauding them for getting more points. But in this sick rodeo, this bizarre, fucked-up clown festival that Sam has put together, we’re here celebrating what I can only describe as the sickness at the core of America. And uh, I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna get Sam.

• The Dreaded: Brennan. His track record of extreme competitiveness and willingness to go above and beyond on the show has made him a player to watch out for. Downplayed somewhat in that this reputation has actually harmed his track record in the show, since other players have begun keeping an eye on him to play around him.

  Brennan, in "Survivor (Part 1)": I don't particularly like winning! I have a job that keeps making me compete, and I don't care about winning! I just don't want to lose.

• Dream Apocalypse: In the episode "Noise Boys", Brennan is given the prompt "An Auctioneer Having An Existential Crisis". He initially improvs an auctioneer delivering blindingly fast auctioneer patter mixed with occasional interjections about his unhappy marriage and personal life, but suddenly takes a much more bleak turn once the bit almost finishes when his character ends up becoming very self-aware:

  Brennan: "Going once... [voice cracks] going once... if I say... if I say "sold"... then we all go home... but if I never say "sold," I stay in your mind's eye, and I don't disappear... [whispering] ...going...going... [prolonged pause as Brennan chokes in despair]... sold."

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Izzy Roland appeared in "Lie Detector" as one of the "scientists" running the machine almost 3 years before she'd participate as a contestant in "Sam Says", as did Alexis Rhiannon, who would compete 5 years later in "The Newly-Web Game".
  • Before they both participated in Season 3, Christine Medrano and Alfred Aquino II played roles as suspects in "Whodunnit" as the production designer and the PA respectively.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season was very short, with only five episodes, and Sam’s intro (stated after “and your host, me!”) was different in every episode. The following seasons were significantly longer, and the intro from the first episode, “I’ve been here the whole time”, became a consistent Once per Episode line.
• Eating the Eye Candy: In "Karaoke Night", Rashawn sings a song about this trope in the style of Aretha Franklin.
• Epic Fail:
  • "As a Cucumber": During "Name That Bird", Katie is given two different pictures of chickens. She almost fails to name them both times.
  • Also "As a Cucumber": Katie is given a chance to sabotage by causing her opponents' BPM to raise. Katie's tactic gets a bunch of laughs when her attempt causes their heart rates to go down by a fairly significant amount.
• Exact Words: In "Sam Says", when the prompt is "Sam says say something we’ll have to bleep", Izzy literally says "Something we’ll have to bleep!" She is awarded the point. Zac tries a similar tactic in "Sam Says 2" when the prompt is "Sam says say something that’s never been said before".
• Fan Community Nicknames: According to Ash, the fans of FixItMan78 are called the “FixItMan Fan Fam”.
• Foreshadowing: In "Deja Vu", the player intros all hint towards the "Groundhog Day" Loop plot of the episode: Trapp is introduced as “taking another bite of the show”, Ify’s intro has Sam ask if he’s “seeing Um, Actually host double”, and Siobhan’s intro states that “one appearance wasn’t enough for her”. On the third loop, Ify expresses frustration about the fact that the intros were foreshadowing.
• Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle: In a segment parodying Knights and Knaves, the puzzle is given to an adventurer... as a distraction while the two guards struggle to figure out an answer to his first question.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The third loop of "Deja Vu" has the name cards for the players, Sam, and the various cameos glitching out to say new things like "Mike Trapped", "Infinity Nwadiwe", "Siobhan Thompsagain", and "Same Reich".
  • In the fourth loop, the names start glitching to random characters or the normal names with the characters replaced Leet Lingo-style, but for one moment, Josh Ruben’s name glitches into a leetspeak version of “No Problem”.
• Friendly Scheming: "Don't Cry" turns out to be a method of picking up cast member Jess Ross after a hard year in which she had major surgery which left her temporarily bedridden and was forced to postpone her wedding due to Covid. The other two players were in on the trick, and multiple assorted Dropout cast members and friends come out to present heartfelt letters of appreciation to Jess. The episode ends with her and her partner Kait being practice-married by their favorite drag queen. Jess technically loses because she broke down in happy tears and therefore lost all her points, but Rekha gives her the prize for the episode: a honeymoon trip for Jess and her fianceé.
• Friendship Song: Katie sings one about Mike Trapp in "Bingo", as part of a prompt.
• Game Show Winnings Cap: "Do I Hear $1?" is eventually revealed to have a total maximum prize pool of $10,000 in the safe. It's implied that the original end state was the safe running out of money, and that would later end up being the end state for the Game Samer "Race to the Bottom", but since the players broke the game before they got there, we'll never know.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Acted out in one of the "Make Some Noise" episodes, with Josh and Brennan playing the angel and devil on Zac’s shoulders. While Josh tells Zac to make good life decisions, Brennan tells him to eat an old deviled egg that’s been sitting out in the sun for days.
• Good Shepherd: Priest Backstreet in "A Game Most Changed" is a kindly holy man recently returned from exile (Backstreet's back), who happily marries the young Porche to the man she loves even though she is set to marry the foul Count Chocula. It is eventually revealed that he is Porche's father in disguise, for... some reason.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "Deja Vu". The first 5 minutes or so are slightly chaotic, but otherwise as normal as Game Changer ever gets. Then Sam kicks a camera by accident, the show holds for a couple minutes, and the episode restarts. The episode starts to break down over time as the damage to the camera builds up.
• Hands Looking Wrong: Played with. In later seasons, when Sam says "I am your host, Sam Reich", he looks at the front and back of his hands, as if to confirm that he is in fact Sam Reich.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Rekha choosing to eliminate Brennan instead of Katie in Ratfish results in them tying at the end of the game, but as the Ratfish's favourite piece of art was Katie's, she wins the game despite Rekha figuring out everyone's identity fastest.
• Identical Grandson: In "Escape the Greenroom", it’s revealed that the players were trapped by Samuel Dalton, Sam Reich’s identical great-grandfather who time-traveled to the future, kidnapped his great-grandson, and took his place.
• Immediate Sequel: The seventh season premiere, "One Year Later" starts mere hours after filming "Sam Says 3" in 2023, as the challenges are meant to take place over the course of the following year.
• In Memoriam: Invoked in the "Whodunnit" episode, which begins with Josh Ruben supposedly being murdered and ends with a title card saying "In memory of Josh Ruben".
• Jump Scare:
  • In "Sam Says 2", one of the questions is "Sam says don’t flinch". When the question is read, a photo of Sam doing a scary pose pops up from each podium, startling most of the players. These podium pop-ups are reused multiple times in "As a Cucumber".
  • Sam repeats this prompt in "Sam Says 3", this time by dropping a dummy of himself from the ceiling, which horrifies the players.

    Lou: Let me tell you, the day I don't curse when a body falls from the sky? Call somebody.

• Lights Off, Somebody Dies: The "Whodunnit" episode begins as normal, but at the point when the game is supposed to start, the lights go off, there's a scream, and when the lights come back on, one of the contestants is lying dead on the floor. The other contestants are then challenged to figure out who murdered him.
• Loophole Abuse: Fairly common and somewhat encouraged. If a player finds a way around a specific game rule, whether or not they'll get the point depends on how funny it is.
  • The original "Make Some Noise" episode has Brennan get a prompt for "a North Dakotan," which Sam obviously intends for him to do a stereotypical accent. He just neutrally describes moving to North Dakota for his wife's job, then calls Sam out for being reductive.
  • "Sam Says" saw all three contestants work out a clever way to answer the prompt to "say something we'll have to bleep" (after realizing that curse words are not bleeped on Dropout). Brennan starts singing a copyrighted song ("Hey Jude" by The Beatles), Izzy literally says "something we'll have to bleep", and Lou declares that the official stated position of Dropout as a company is that OJ didn't do it. The former and latter do end up having to be censored, and all three get a point for creativity.
  • Another Lou moment: Sam specifically mentions they can't Trash the Set during "Sam Says upset a producer". While Lou breaks nothing, he still repeatedly messes with the set in ways that even Sam notes would take a real amount of time to redo and fix, including unscrewing a bunch of lightbulbs around the stage entrance.
  • One of the puzzles in "Escape the Greenroom" involves driving a remote-controlled toy car around the parking lot with a controller bolted to the wall away from the only windows that can see the parking lot. Siobhan and Lou try to play the game for real for a moment, then give up and FaceTime each other so Siobhan can drive more accurately. Sam's impressed by their ingenuity.
  • The final prompt of "Second Place" is "Who will forfeit the most points?" Brennan attempts to forfeit "negative infinity" points and is disqualified for it. This results in Ally and Oscar being tied with more points than him, putting him in second place and winning the episode even though the loophole didn't go anywhere.
  • One challenge in "Deja Vu" is to give Sam a duck from a shelf at the top of the set. Trapp immediately runs off set to grab a ladder from the production team. Sam shuts the idea down before it can go anywhere because of the specific mechanics in mind for that challenge.
  • In "One Year Later", Vic responds to "who can bring this Sam standee to the most remote location?" by photographing themself with the standee in a pile of hundreds of TV remotes. Sam is so unimpressed with their shenanigans that he deducts a point from them despite already having no points, forcing the VFX team to add a negative sign to their point display.
• Mad Scientist: Sam Reich's great-grandfather Samuel Dalton in "Escape the Greenroom", who combined his magic knowledge with electromagnetism and time-traveled to the future to kidnap and replace Sam Reich and try to blow up the Game Changer studio.
• Malevolent Masked Men: Partway through "Tell Us About Yourself" — a game which primarily consists of Sam asking each of the contestants to "Tell us about yourself," rewarding points if they're deemed "true" — a creepy figure in black robes and a Plague Doctor mask named "The Scorekeeper" suddenly appears in the voice call, Sam lamenting that he's summoned whenever you say the word "scorekeeper" where there is none. As the game goes on, with the contestants noticing some aspects that are true about themselves are deemed "false," they realize they're actually asking questions that are "true or false" about the Scorekeeper himself, concluding that the actual challenge is trying to determine who he is. They eventually manage to find the correct answer: Tony Hawk.
• Manchurian Agent: In "Sleeper Agents", the contestants must activate the sleeper agents hidden among regular people around the studio by speaking the correct activation phrase (selected from a list of very odd phrases).
• The Many Deaths of You: The video game in "Deja Vu" (later reused for "Beat the Buzzer") contains a variety of possible ways to die, including by snake bite, falling in a hole, severe paper cut, and peacefully in your sleep.
• Mind Screw: In the "Sam Says" episodes, Sam tries everything he can to mess with his players. Inflicting this trope on them is one of his favorite methods.
  • In "Sam Says 2", Sam shows a video of himself saying "Sam Says" that's been dubbed over with Adam Conover's voice. He then shows a second clip of Adam Conover saying "Sam Says", except this time dubbed with his own voice. He then shows a third clip of him saying "Sam Says", but this time he's doing an impression of Adam Conover doing an impression of his voice. The contestants are suitably disturbed.
  • In "Sam Says 3", Sam runs a sequence where players need to memorize a series of actions in a row, with each action then being added onto the list. Players begin with blowing a raspberry, then blowing a raspberry and dancing, then blowing a raspberry and dancing and howling, etc. Sam then asks the players to make a dedication of this episode to someone they know... only for Lou to perform all prior actions and then do his dedication, revealing the rule about actions was still in effect. Vic and Jacob are appalled, and lose points.
  • The climax of "Sam Says 3" has Sam load the players onto a party bus with some of their colleagues for a few hours of fun. They get drunk, hang out, and unwind after a stressful episode... only to be returned to the studio, and told that several rules that were in effect on the show were still in play on the bus. Vic, Jacob and Lou then look on in horror as their points drop by 10 or more for each player.
  • Outside of Sam Says, "Escape the Greenroom" has a few. The most notable is that the video of Sam playing throughout the episode is a recording, not a live feed. ^note  He's actually Bound and Gagged in the bathroom.
• Monster Clown: Roscoe in Deja Vu, played by Josh Ruben.
• Motive Rant: When the murderer is unmasked at the end of the "Whodunnit" episode, a Large Ham motive rant ensues. As one of the meta touches of the episode, his motive is that he committed the murder so he could do a dramatic motive rant to show off his acting ability.
• Nested Story Reveal: "Bingo" is presented as a normal game of bingo to Katie, Brennan, and Raph where they have to fulfill prompts to earn bingo balls. It turns out that Lily, Trapp, and Rehka respectively are in the green room feeding the original players the prompts to fill out bingo boards about their behavior. It also turns out that Tao, Carolyn, and Jess Ross respectively are doing the same thing in another location for the green room players via a PA.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Parodied and Invoked. The season 6 trailer has a shot of Jacob Wysocki snapping and yelling at Sam, shouting that Sam has crossed a line and hit a nerve before calmly declaring he's going home and walking off-set, complete with dramatic music. ...The camera then pans to show that the screen next to Sam shows the prompt "Do something great for the trailer", and Jacob calmly walks back on set saying it should cut good as everyone cracks up.
• Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon: The "Whodunnit" episode begins with one of the contestants being murdered, and the other two contestants setting out to solve the murder. In the course of the episode, it's established that the episode was always meant to be a murder mystery game, but the contestant selected to be the victim was only supposed to be stabbed with a retractable prop knife, which somebody replaced with a real knife at the last minute. Amusingly, when Rekha wins and is awarded a real high-quality kitchen knife as a prize, it's left in the original box — as Sam attests, the producers were very scared of it somehow getting involved with the murder mystery given how meta it was.
• Number of the Beast: In "Tell Us About Yourself", the score is kept by an ominous masked and hooded figure who sits with the three contestants' scores displayed in a row in front of him. At one point, when the scores are at 6-4-5, Jess says, "We gotta get the score to be 6-6-6." (They don't actually succeed, because Alfred is the next to score a point, moving the numbers to 7-4-5.)
• Ominous Visual Glitch:
  • In "Tell Us About Yourself", the image starts glitching every time the camera switches to the sinister Scorekeeper. The glitching immediately stops when the Scorekeeper unmasks at the end.
  • The last few loops of "Deja Vu" start to break down, gaining glitchy VHS taping artifacts along the way. By the last loop, the video is jumping around all over the place and keeps cutting to archival footage of Sam as a baby, and the name cards for players and guests are either illegible or modified to be on theme.
• Onion Tears: The first challenge of "Don't Cry" is to chop an onion without tearing up.
• The Other Darrin: Lampshaded in "Deja Vu", where Zac had to step in at the last minute for a role originally written for Grant (spilling spaghetti everywhere just before a surprise podium inspection), as Grant caught Covid. Sam still insists on calling him "Grant" throughout.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic:
  • A couple are employed during "Escape the Greenroom".
    • One puzzle involves a player knocking over pins with an RC car controlled by a controller bolted to a wall inside the room, while another player looks out the window and gives them directions, in order to get the symbols corresponding to numbers needed to open a combination lock. After a few minutes of futzing, Lou decides to just have Siobhan Facetime him so she can see what she's doing via his phone camera.

      Brennan: YOU DIDN'T COUNT ON INGENUITY, DID YA, MOTHERFUCKER?!!

    • At the end of said puzzle, Siobhan is struggling to knock over the last pin and get a clear view of it. Brennan, knowing there's only a few options for the final digit, brute-forces the puzzle by entering random digits until he gets the right one and unlocks it.
  • In "Deja Vu", when the podiums get too messy to easily clean, the players start bribing the random podium inspector with the money they received for the “bribe Sam” question. As revealed in the behind the scenes episode, this was not expected, but Brian accepted the bribes when Sam’s back was turned, so Sam went along with it. In the end it made the game easier, allowing players to pass the inspection without throwing spaghetti at each other.
• Overly Long Gag: In "Bingo", when Brennan is asked to defend Elon Musk on Instagram Live, he starts by saying the negative things that "some people think" about Elon Musk (with "some people" evidently including himself). He spends nearly three full minutes detailing every negative trait of Elon Musk. In the end, he doesn’t even pretend that Musk’s detractors are wrong, and simply tells Musk to get enough sleep, thereby technically “defending” him from sleep deprivation.
• Pick a Card: Sam opens "Escape the Greenroom" by doing a quick card trick for the cast, but is interrupted by a P.A. before he can go further than having Siobhan, Lou, and Brennan pick a card. They realize that they were all shown the six of diamonds, and that card ends up being the key to the last puzzle.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: Some episodes get spun off into their own show, some seem designed to be spun off. "The Official Cast Recording" in hindsight looks a lot more like a test episode to see if the podcast Off Book can be adapted into a TV series. "A Game Most Changed" similarly seems to be a test episode to see how The Improv Shakespeare Company might work as a show, but it has yet to be developed into a full series.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The intro theme of Game Changer is a royalty-free song, specifically "Sem Você" by Harper Rey.
• Refuse to Rescue the Disliked: In "Escape the Greenroom", when Sam is discovered to be Bound and Gagged in the bathroom, the players (still angry about being locked in the room, and having skipped the expositional newspapers implying that it was Sam’s Identical Grandfather who actually imprisoned them) put off rescuing him, and debate going to lunch and leaving him tied up.
• Retraux: The video game in "Deja Vu" is made in this style, with pixelated graphics and chiptune music.
• Reunion Show: It's mentioned by Erika that "Beat the Buzzer" could be called a reunion for The Seven campaign from Dimension 20, as all of the cast members (except Brennan) have a role in the episode; Rekha, Becca, and Erika are the contestants, Persephone and Aabria appear as actors for the show, and Izzy was meant to be available via FaceTime for one of the challenges, but was circumvented by Becca pulling out a picture of Izzy on her phone.
• Rewatch Bonus: An unintentional example. Rewatching "Tell Us About Yourself" while knowing the Scorekeeper’s true identity (Tony Hawk) makes it hilarious that Jess found out that he liked to skateboard on her first guess, and makes it clear that Sam’s reply to that guess ("Interesting choice, Jess… I’ll give you the point") was deliberate misdirection.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: "Sam Says 3": Henry, the large pig in a disproportionately tiny cowboy hat.
• Rule of Three: Brennan attempts to exploit this during "Second Place," where the winner of each prompt is whoever gives the second-best response. In response to the prompt "Who can do the best Donald Trump impression?", Ally gives their serviceable impression, but Brennan makes his deliberately terrible, as does Oscar. When Sam asks Brennan what his strategy was, he explains that, knowing they're all comedians, whatever the second person does establishes a pattern that the third person will attempt to play off of.
• Running Gag:
  • In the sales-pitch episodes ("A Sponsored Episode"), in which Trapp, Grant, and Rekha must give their best sales pitches for strange objects to host Sam Reich, nearly every pitch ends up beginning "Now, Sam, where are you from?" After the gag has gone on for a while, they start to sneak it in more creatively. Similarly, Sam's hometown Copley Square Theater is brought up early in the first rendition and keeps getting referred to and progressively more butchered as the pitches go on.
  • In "A Sponsored Episode" and its sequels, Trapp is given an edible but wholly unappealing product to sell and Rekha and Grant ask him to take a bite.
• Sadistic Game Show:
  • Sam Reich will stop at almost nothing to torment his players. Episodes have included making players bid against each other for Sam's money, having players control their heart rates while being exposed to stressful stimuli, rigging the game against a specific player for Sam's amusement, and surprising players with an escape room.^note 
  • The trailers for seasons 5 and 6 play this angle up, starting with audio clips of various players complaining about how torturous the game is.
• Saying Too Much: From one of the "Make Some Noise" episodes:

  Brennan: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, over the past four days, you have seen the state's prosecutor attempt to effectively bamboozle you with a series of hearsay arguments and loose, speculative evidence placing my client near the scene of the crime during the time of the murder. This evidence does nothing to indicate motive or means in the horrific murder of Roger Bell. Ultimately, it will be your decision to say "Does this man deserve a lifetime in a federal penitentiary based on specious, inconclusive evidence?" You are tasked to consider the evidence and whether it proves beyond a reasonable doubt whether my client is guilty. Is my client a perfect man? No!
  Zac: I killed him, yeah.

• Second Place Is for Losers: Brennan seems to espouse this in the episode "Second Place", as he's immensely frustrated by the whole premise: a competition where the person who does second-best is declared the winner. His natural competitiveness means he can't help but try to come first in every task anyway, even knowing full well that it will do him no favours when it comes to earning points. Ultimately, he makes the most points when he actively engages with the premise and finds interesting ways to subvert it more subtly, such as the Donald Trump impersonation and dance contest rounds, or giving "negative infinity" as an answer for how many points he will forfeit; this approach ends up winning him the episode, to his further frustration. However, he does clarify at the end that he doesn't think that coming second, or third, or whatever place is bad as long as you gave your all; what he dislikes about the episode is Sam ignoring the achievements of those coming first in each challenge.
• Second Place Is for Winners: The whole premise of "Second Place", where the goal is to come second in a group of three. In every round, points are awarded to whoever does second best, and at the end of the episode the contestant with the second highest score is declared the winner. Brennan, who hates the premise on principle, ends up winning, to his chagrin.

  Brennan: [flatly] What's happening is wrong.

• Serial Escalation: The "Make Some Noise" episodes go from prompts like "cat" and "cow" in season 1 to prompts like "the Tooth Fairy fucks up the whole routine" and "an auctioneer's existential crisis" in season 4. Presumably part of why the concept got its own spinoff was because they were running out of places to go with the original players.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The camera that Sam kept accidentally breaking in "Deja Vu", causing the loop to reset? It never had any tape in it to begin with.
• Share the Sickness: Played for Laughs in the first "Sam Says". Sam asks the players to "upset a producer" and Brennan responds by walking out from behind his podium and coughing violently (the episode was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic). Multiple crew members audibly gasp in horror, the cameraman moves away from Brennan, and Sam admits that he genuinely got a little upset.^note 
• Shipper on Deck: In the "Whodunnit" episode Rekha and Grant spend a lot of time insisting that two of the murder suspects with bad blood between them have a lot of chemistry and that their arguments come across as Unresolved Sexual Tension.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the intro for "Sam Says":

  Sam: This is Game Changer, the only game show where the game changes every show! ...Except for Ellen's Game of Games, Taskmaster, and a few others that have come to light since I wrote that.

  • Vic's entry for most creative outfit for "One Year Later", a full squid costume that over the course of the episode is removed piece by piece until Vic is in their underwear, is based on the cover of Animorphs #27: The Exposed.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: No matter how competitive the players get with each other, there is always one constant: it's everyone against Sam.
  • This is emphasized in the trailer for season 7, where after the previous seasons trailers emphasized the Sadistic Game Show side of Game Changer, season 7 begins with a joyful little tune inviting people to participate before a Smash Cut to Lisa Gilroy dropping a Precision F-Strike against Sam as part of a rap, and the rest of the trailer shows contestants airing their greivances and frustratious against him.
• Solve the Soup Cans: "Beat the Buzzer" gives trivia questions, but the normal buzzers for the show break down. The players have to solve various unrelated puzzles to earn the ability to buzz in and answer the questions, like beating a "pirate" at Battleship and ordering takeout.
• Something Only They Would Say:
  • An unintentional case happens in "Lie Detector": Jess explains her difficulty with telling her left and right, sharing an anecdote of how whenever she's driving with her fiancé, she never tells her "make a left or right" but "me or you," to which the lie detector dings it as true. She, Tao, and Sam laugh, but Brennan gives a surprised, but knowing look to the camera, seemingly piecing together that the lie detector is "powered" by their respective SO's.
  • In "Ratfish (Part 2)", Brennan goes off on one of his signature rants in Katie's DMs. She immediately realizes who's behind it. Brennan's been eliminated by that point, so he doesn't really care.
• Soup Is Medicine: In “Nom Nom Nom”, the corresponding food for the sound of coughing is the chicken soup.
• Speak of the Devil: In "Tell Us About Yourself", after the sinister-looking Scorekeeper manifests, Sam claims that there's an old showbiz legend that he will be summoned any time somebody says the word "scorekeeper" on a game show that doesn't have one.
• Special Guest:
  • "Yes or No?" has a video prompt from Jewel.
  • Zac Oyama was unavailable for "The Substitute", the third of the "Make Some Noise" game samers, so he was replaced by Michael Winslow, to the horror of Josh and Brennan.
  • "Ham it Up" has Grant O'Brien, Christine Medrano and Lou Wilson test their acting chops against Giancarlo Esposito.
  • "Like My Coffee..." has an appearance from "Grant O'Brien's favorite porn star" Ty Mitchell, to Grant's absolute horror. "Like My Coffee 2" ups the ante by bringing in Debbie O'Brien, Grant's mother.
  • As "Tell Us About Yourself" progresses, the more it's revealed that the game is actually about determining the identity of the mysterious masked Scorekeeper. The answer: Tony Hawk.
  • "Survivor: Battle Royale" has a variety of guest judges, such as former Survivor contestant Rick Devens, MasterChef winner Claudia Sandoval, America's Got Talent judge Howie Mandel, and RuPaul's Drag Race alum Laganja Estranja.
  • "Second Place" has a minigame parodying Deal or No Deal, so Sam brings in former Deal suitcase girl and friend of the show Hayley Marie Norman.
  • The titular "Ratfish", a false cast member in a parody of The Circle (2018), is played by Eric Wareheim.
• Spotting the Thread: A staple of any episode featuring Brennan is him piecing together the premise ahead of the actual reveal or locating clues onset; during the "Survivor" episodes, whilst Lou finds the first immunity loop-de-loop, it does prompt Brennan to begin actively seeking them out, and ends up finding them all. Comes back to bite him in "Bingo", where "speculating about the twist" is a square on the bingo card associated with him.
• Spy Cam: The "funniest candid of Sam" challenge in "One Year Later" is answered by a collaborative effort from all three players and Sam's wife, who planted a camera in Sam's kitchen for at least two months^*. Sam is both horrified and impressed.
• Stepping Out for a Quick Cup of Coffee: At the end of "Pencils Down", Sam is called away by a crew member because his car is getting towed and tells the cast that whatever they do, they shouldn't graffiti the back wall of the set during the 10 minutes or so he'll be dealing with that. The cast wastes no time grabbing spray paint and going to town.
• Studio Audience: "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience", naturally. The players have to use the audience's reactions to figure out what they're actually supposed to be doing to earn points, since they laugh and cheer when the players get closer to what they're supposed to be doing and boo when they get further away.
• Stylistic Suck: The FixItMan78 tech tutorial in "Deja Vu" is full of lame effects, contains about a minute of product and Patreon plugs before he gets to the actual tutorial, and is presented in the driest, most deadpan way possible (courtesy of SungWon Cho).
• The Swear Jar: "Sam Says 3" has one that deducts points from players whenever they curse. None of them can avoid losing points to it. It comes back in "One Year Later", when the winner is given the swear jar and its contents: a U.S. government bond worth $1,000 that can be redeemed in 2035.
• Time Travel: In "Escape the Greenroom", it’s revealed that Sam’s evil great-grandfather travelled to the future to replace him.
• Trash the Set: The premise of a couple of episodes has this as a deliberate feature:-
  • "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience" has Becka, Izzy and Erika interacting with a fake kitchen set based on a TV sitcom, reacting to feedback from a laugh track, and memorising and repeating the appropriate actions as they go; as the prompts become increasingly unhinged, they find themselves smashing furniture and crockery, blasting the set with a fire extinguisher, and the episode culminates in Erika triggering the fire suppression sprinklers.
  • "Escape The Greenroom" has Brennan, Lou and Siobhan locked in the studio's greenroom, which has been retrofitted as an escape room. Clues in the form of playing cards are hidden in mundane items dotted around the room - Lou wastes no time in immediately smashing a fake guitar and various other items; it is so sudden and unprompted Siobhan flinches. At one point in a moment of frustration he smashes another vase that was decidely not breakaway, to the surprise of all three of them.

    Lou: Baba-Booey, Baba-Booey! [SMASH!]

  • "Pencils Down" concludes with Caldwell, Kiana and Nathan covering the back wall of the Game Changer set with grafitti.
  • "Sam Says 1" has the prompt "upset a producer," to which Lou walks up to a doorway lit up with many decorative lightbulbs and starts unscrewing all of them.
• "Truman Show" Plot: Referenced in "The Surprise Murder Mystery Game Show" episode, right after The Reveal that Grant is part of the mystery and Rekha is the only actual contestant.
• Twister Game Hijinks: In "Like My Coffee" where the game is about making up innuendos and pickup lines, the players get the prompt "Threeways are like a game of Twister." Jess suggests "Difficult if you have a bad back," earning her a point. Grant suggests "Stop when you see red," which also gets him a point even though Trapp points out that it's not how Twister works. Finally, Trapp suggests "Fun in theory but rarely happens," earning him two points.
• Undignified Death: Most of the deaths in the video game in "Deja Vu" are hilariously lame ways to die, including "bleeding to death from a paper cut" and the unused "getting a haircut to death".
• Unexpectedly Obscure Answer:
  • During "Sam Says", amongst a bunch of random prompts is the prompt to "remember that the virtuous economic cycle is when earnings contribute to taxes contribute to government programs contribute to earnings." Later in the game, Sam asks Brennan if he remembers what the virtuous economic cycle is - after a couple of seconds' hesitation, Brennan is able to recite the core components.
  • Invoked in "As a Cucumber". The bird quiz section has simple answers like "chicken" for Katie and Carolyn, and obscure answers like "roseate spoonbill" for Brennan. The point, of course, isn't actually who gets the answers right, it's to stress out Brennan.
  • "Deja Vu" opens with a battery of these, including asking for a specific HTML color code. Since the episode contains a "Groundhog Day" Loop, the players eventually figure them all out.
  • "Beat the Buzzer" Inverts this: all the questions are very easy, even for non-trivia nerds. It's actually buzzing in that's the hard part.
• Unexplained Accent: "A Game Most Changed" has a group of Cockney minstrels performing at the duke's feté... in Verona.
• The Unreveal: Sam decides it'll be more fun for the cast of Ratfish not to learn the titular Ratfish's true identity until they watch the show.
• Unwinnable Joke Game:
  • "Yes or No?" had host Sam Reich asked one question repeatedly the entire episode: yes or no, after which he would dole out points according to a rule only he knew, and victory was granted to whoever could figure out the rule. After twenty minutes of gags, acapella singing, at least one guest, and a rather epic rant, the rule was figured out: No matter what happens, Brennan couldn't win.
  • "Bingo" appeared to be a simple game of bingo where the three players on the stage fulfilled prompts to earn bingo balls. The prompts were actually being made by three other players in the green room, who were each trying to fill in bingo boards for one of the stage players. The green room players actually had three ''other'' players doing the same thing to ''them'' from another location using a PA to give them prompts. The stage players all had at least three numbers on their bingo boards that weren't in the bingo ball tumbler, so the game was impossible for them to win.
• Unwitting Pawn: Katie, Brennan, and Raph in "Bingo", who don't know that they're being watched from the green room by another trio of players with their own bingo boards specifically for the original three's behaviors. The second trio is also being watched by a third trio in a different green room with a third set of bingo boards for their behaviors.
• Wham Line: The objective of “Don’t Cry” is explicitly stated at the start of the episode: don’t cry. Initially, the prompts are aimed at all of the players. But after Jess reads a heartwarming letter from her mother, the true goal of the episode — to make Jess feel loved and cry tears of joy — becomes clear when Rekha starts reading the next letter.

  Rekha: Dear… Jess.

• Whole-Plot Reference: "A Game Most Changed" plays on Romeo and Juliet, with the young Porche meeting Antonio at a party held by her father, and them getting married that very night without the knowledge of her father because he intends for her to marry someone else. While this version is not quite as tragic as the original, it does still end in the death of the mermaid Google.
• Zonk: "Secret Samta" has these for about half of its "prizes", with options like "factory reset your phone". One episode ends with Raph dressed in a Sia costume and covered in color run dust.

---