History Series / RichardOsmansHouseOfGames

* ArtisticLicenseGeography: The whole point of the ''Where Is Kazakhstan? '' round. Contestants have to guess where a particular geographic feature, country/city or landmark is. Sometimes the only reason they even get the right continent is because the show provides a map to narrow it down a little bit.

* SuddenDeath: Played straight for each individual day's winner: if the leading scores in the final round are tied, they'll usually just play on as normal until somebody pulls ahead, but sometimes they stop and do a sudden-death question just for the tied players instead. Averted if two people are tied for overall winner at the end of the week, when both of them get a trophy.

* StrictlyFormula: For a long time, the first game of each week was always Rhyme Time, where the contestants are shown two questions whose answers rhyme with each other. (Later series have mixed it up a bit by sometimes using "Sorry, Wrong Number"[[note]]Where the answer contains a number which must have some kind of mathematical operation on it - e.g. if the answer was "101 Dalmatians" and the instruction was "multiply by 2" the correct response would be "202 Dalmatians"[[/note]] instead, and the more recent "Sounds Like..."[[note]]rebuses, basically[[/note]] also appears to have quickly become another choice.) The second game in each episode is always a game where the contestants play in pairs, and the final game of each episode is always Answer Smash.

* GratuitousForeignLanguage: "Reichard Ösman's Haus Der Spiele" is a general knowledge round where all the questions are given in foreign languages. To help the contestants out, they play in pairs, increasing the chances that one of them will know enough of the language to work it out.

** "Win When They're Singing" (where a song starts playing but the music is faded out before the vocals begin, and the panellists have to hit their buzzer at the point where they think the singing starts) tends to be this if there's a radio DJ among the contestants; Scott Mills managed to get his one win of the week by getting every song accurate within a second.
** "I'm Terrible At Dating": The contestants are given a historical event, closest guess to the correct year wins a point, plus a bonus point if they're spot on. Professional historian Kate Williams was a panellist once, and unsurprisingly aced this one. (Though to counter that, in another round she managed to get the location of Tutankhamun's tomb wrong by about 2000 miles, which even the show's official quiz book lampshades as an EpicFail).

* LoopholeAbuse: "All in the Details" is a team game requiring one member of the team to guess the answer based on clues their teammate filled in before the show. The only proviso regarding the clues is that the writer can't directly state the answer, so many of them resort to writing things that don't even attempt to fill in the blanks but obliquely hint at the answer.

** The 6 October episode had perhaps the worst round of "King of the Jumble" ever. Only 2 of the 7 questions were answered correctly; three of the players couldn't wrap their heads around the answers being anagrams of each other, and the fourth was actively throwing the game because he'd won the previous three days. (And he ''still'' won that day!)

* BraggingRightsReward: Largely averted with the daily prizes, many of which are genuinely nice and useful things to have, and are sometimes even things the contestants genuinely need - the wheelie suitcase rapidly became one of the most popular prizes ever upon its introduction. Played straight with the overall winners' trophy, which is frequently the subject of jokes about its low quality (upon winning it, Alex Horne discovered it unscrewed into three pieces quite easily).

* TheAce: Angela Barnes won every single episode in her week, the only contestant ever to manage this,[[note]]Nish Kumar, Steve Pemberton, Phill Jupitus, Susan Calman, Robert Rinder, Maisie Adam, Bill Turnbull, Chris Washington, Sarah Millican and Simon Hickson came very close, winning four episodes and only losing the fifth by a single point (Kumar repeated the feat in a ''House of Champions'' week, and only lost the fifth on a tie-breaker; Turnbull lost his fifth episode on a three-way tiebreak); Ed Gamble, Hal Cruttenden, Stephen Mangan, Rufus Hound, Steve Backshall, Josie Long, Colin Murray, Shaun Williamson, Joe Thomas and Ed Byrne also won four shows, but lost the other one by a larger margin, as did Rick Edwards in a ''House of Champions'' week; and Naga Munchetty, Richard Herring, Dane Baptiste, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Sanjeev Kohli won four, but finished third or worse in the other show. Barnes also may have had some luck on her side, as she faced arguably lesser competition than any of them[[/note]] and never with less than a seven-point margin over the runner-up (in one case with a ''fifteen''-point margin). (She did, however, fail to repeat the feat when she returned for a House of Champions week, finishing a distant third on the Wednesday; whilst she won the other four shows, two of them were by a significantly narrower margin.)

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* TheAce: Angela Barnes won every single episode in her week, the only contestant ever to manage this,[[note]]Nish Kumar, Steve Pemberton, Phill Jupitus, Susan Calman, Robert Rinder, Maisie Adam, Bill Turnbull, Chris Washington, Sarah Millican and Simon Hickson came very close, winning four episodes and only losing the fifth by a single point (Kumar repeated the feat in a ''House of Champions'' week, and only lost the fifth on a tie-breaker; Turnbull lost his fifth episode on a three-way tiebreak); Ed Gamble, Hal Cruttenden, Stephen Mangan, Rufus Hound, Steve Backshall, Josie Long, Colin Murray, Shaun Williamson, Joe Thomas and Ed Byrne also won four shows, but lost the other one by a larger margin, as did Rick Edwards in a ''House of Champions'' week; and Naga Munchetty, Richard Herring, Dane Baptiste, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Sanjeev Kohli won four, but finished third or worse in the other show. Barnes also may have had some luck on her side, as she faced arguably lesser competition than any of them[[/note]] and never with less than a seven-point margin over the runner-up (in one case with a ''fifteen''-point margin).
** Angela Barnes returned for a Champion of Champions week, pitted against three other former winners. Only time will tell if she can repeat the streak, but she won the Monday game by a clear five points, and Tuesday by seven.

** Angela Barnes returned for a Champion of Champions week, pitted against three other former winners. Only time will tell if she can repeat the streak, but she won the Monday game by a clear five points, and after the second round she had more points than everyone else combined.