Summaries

Synopsis

The game is played with two teams of five people each, one team consisting of men and the other of women. In most episodes, one of the teams returned as the carry-over champions. Both teams would play games involving word association.

In the first round, the captain of the challengers, or of the team that won a coin toss if there were two new teams due to the previous champions retiring undefeated, would be shown two words by host James O'Neill, with the rest of the team wearing headphones so that they could not hear the options. The captain would select one of the words, and the team then had 40 seconds to communicate the word down the line. They did this by the captain tapping the second person on the shoulder, which is their cue to remove their headphones, then trying to describe the word to them. They had to guess the word that the captain was trying to describe to them, and when they guessed the given word, the second person then tapped the third person on the shoulder before becoming the person trying to describe the word. This process would continue down the line until either the fifth person in the team correctly guessed the word (known as a "hot streak" and the origin of the show's title), the 40 second time limit ran out or the team were stopped by the judge (when a two-tone buzzer would sound) because they had breached the rules by either repeating a key word or a form of a key word (small words like "a" or "the" were allowed to be repeated without penalty), miming (by either the person giving or receiving clues to the word), saying all or part of the given word or giving an illegal clue such as one describing the length of the word ("short" or "long", though the clue giver was permitted to give relative clues like "shorter" or "longer" if the receiver's guess was close, for example if they said "ski" when the given word was "skiing" or vice versa). The team would receive $5 for every person who correctly guessed the word, meaning that if they had a hot streak, they would win $20. The champions or the losers of the coin toss then played in a similar way with the word not chosen by the first team to play.

For the second round, the first round's captains would become the fifth people in the line and everyone else moved one place up the line, making the second people in each team the new captains. After this, the round was played in the same way as the first round except that the captain of the team that was trailling was given the choice of two words (if both of the teams were tied, the team that went first in the first round did the same in the second round). The third round began with a similar change of captains and with the captain of the trailling team given the choice of two words (again, the team that went first in the first round did so in this round if both teams were tied), but this time, each person who correctly guessed the given word would add $10 to their team's score, meaning that the team would receive $40 if they could get a hot streak. The team with the most money at the end of this round won the game and either became or remained the champions. If the teams were tied after three rounds, then a tie-breaker word was played, with the captain of the team who played second in the first round being shown the word and given the option to play the word themselves or pass it to the opposing team. The team that played the word, in the same way as the previous rounds, had to get a hot streak in order to win the game. If they fell short because time ran out or they were stopped by the judge, the other team would win the game. The losing team would receive a consolation prize, and if the champions had been defeated, they would also take home the money they had won on their previous appearances. The money won by the winning team across the three rounds would serve as the team's starting bank in the bonus round.

The new champions would then play the bonus round, in which they had to come up with words that described certain subjects, which could take the form of people, places or things. The person who had been the team's captain in the first round was shown the first subject while their team-mates donned headphones in an isolation area behind the podium. The captain then had to lock in four obvious responses related to the subject that they thought the rest of the team would be able to match on their return. Once the captain had chosen their responses, the music in the headphones would stop, which was the cue for the rest of the team to remove them, come out of isolation and join the captain. The rest of the team were given five seconds each (twenty seconds in all) to come up with as many responses as they could think of, aiming to match the responses previously given by the captain, with the time starting after the host revealed the subject to them. The team's responses had to match those given by the captain exactly, except that a response with an "s" added to the end of the word was allowed to match the singular form of the word. Each time the team gave a response that matched one given by the captain, they would be paid the same amount as their starting bank, so the team could win up to four times the starting bank if the rest of the team matched all four of their captain's responses.

A second subject was then played under similar rules, except that this time, each response given by the captain that was said by the rest of the team paid double the starting bank, so if the rest of the team gave all four of the captain's responses to this subject, then eight times the starting bank would be added on to what the team had won from the first subject. The third and final subject required the rest of the team to match all four responses given by the captain in order for the team to win five times the money they had won from the first two subjects. If the rest of the team couldn't match all of their captain's responses, then the money they had received from the first two subjects was all that they won on that night.

If the same team could remain as champions for five nights in a row, then the bonus round was played slightly differently. This time, once the rest of the team had been placed in isolation with their headphones on, the host would show three subjects to the captain, and they would choose one of the subjects to play. After they had locked in their four responses and the rest of the team returned, the host would initially tell the team the subjects that the captain had knocked back, then he gave them twenty seconds (five seconds for each person in the team) to try and match the responses given by the captain with the time starting as soon as the host revealed the subject that the captain had chosen. If the rest of the team were unable to match all of the captain's responses, the team would return the following night as champions and have another chance if they defeated their new challengers, but if they matched all four of the captain's responses, the team would win a cash prize of $50,000 and would also retire undefeated.

In later episodes, the number of rounds played before the bonus round was increased from three to four, with $5 paid to each team for every person who correctly guessed the given word in the first three rounds, and this amount tripling to $15 in the fourth round (these new rules increased the maximum possible starting bank for the bonus round from $80 to $120).