Les Jeux de 20 Heures is based on the immensely popular French television game show of the same name. The show, which ran from 1976 to 1987 on the FR3 network, mixed celebrity contestants with ordinary people from a different region of France each week. The rules for the board game include four quiz formats used on the TV show, all based on words and sentences: La phrase de Maitre Capello, where one contestant makes up a short sentence and the others are given clues to try to figure it out; Si je vous dis, where contestants are given an eight-letter word and must try to come up with as many other words as possible using that word's letters only once; L'adverbe, where players try to guess an adverb drawn at random by asking questions; and Le mot de la fin, where one player chooses a six to eight letter secret word, and the rest try to work out that word by proposing other words and getting feedback on which letters of the proposed word are either in the right place or included elsewhere in the secret word.