America Says

Main rounds

Two teams of four compete, consisting of friends and family. In each round, one team is given a prompt and seven answers with the first letter of each word being shown (for example, if the prompt is "When I think of Italy, I think of [blank], an answer could be "L______ T____" for Leaning Tower. The length of the blank is a clue to the length of the answer, though the exact letter count is not shown.

The team has 30 seconds to guess all seven answers correctly. One at a time in turn order, team members offer an answer; if it is correct, the answer is filled out, the team gets 100 points (200 in the second round and 300 in the third round) and the player can guess again. If the answer is incorrect, the next player in line makes a guess. If a player speaks out of turn, the team is penalized 5 seconds on the clock. This process continues, with control going back to the beginning of the line if the fourth team member guesses incorrectly, until the team successfully fills out all seven answers (giving them 1000 bonus points in the first round, 2000 in the second round, and 3000 in the third round), or time expires.

If time expires, the other team may make guesses, one at a time, for 100 points each (200 in the second round and 300 points in the third round). Guesses are untimed, but the stealing round ends once all of the answers are filled out or the team guesses incorrectly. Teams may confer on what answer to give (during COVID-effected seasons, each team member gave one answer).

Synonyms and plurals for a word are acceptable if they fill in the blank: for example, "chefs" and "cook" would be acceptable for "cooks" . As a general rule, other than questions that explicitly deal with synonyms for a given word, the show tries to avoid including two or more synonyms in the answers when they do not fill in the same blanks (for example, "actor" and "thespian" would not be separate answers for most questions unless the question were something like "____ is another word for a performer" (CC: Blank is another word for a performer.).

In the event of a tie after the third round, a tiebreaker is played between the team captains. The first letter of the top answer is shown, and then the question is shown. The first captain to buzz in is given the chance to answer. If the answer given is correct, that captain wins the game for his or her team. If the answer given is incorrect, then the other team wins automatically.

On October 29, 2019, "The Canadians" (Ayumi Iizuka, Doug Morency, David Ivkovic, and Paul 'PK' Kingston) became the first team to complete a perfect game, amassing 10,400 points in three perfect rounds of 1,700 points, 3,400 points, and 5,100 points (plus a 200-point steal although missing 3 additional opportunities for steals), and went on to win the bonus round in 39 seconds.

Bonus round

In the Bonus Round, the winning team has 60 seconds to correctly identify the top answers to four survey questions. The first question has only the top answer, the second has the top two answers, the third has the top three answers, and the forth has the top four answers. Once all of the required answers are filled out, the team will move on to the next question. Only the player whose turn it was to guess as indicated by a mini screen showing at them was allowed to guess and all other players had to wait their turn to speak while the player whose actively taking a turn guessing gave an answers. If a player speaks while it's not their turn to answer, it's out of turn and it'll take away 5 seconds for each out of turn mistake, making it harder for the team to complete the final challenge for this game show.

Any player on the team may use the Skip button at any time if they get stuck on a question (they can only use the skip button once up to the third question in the round so they have to be careful about when to use it because some questions are harder than others). This will have the team move on to the next question, but they must return to the skipped question after all the other questions have been completed if time allows. If not, the answers for the skipped question and the question that the team was on at the time that the clock reached zero.

If the team can give all ten correct answers before time runs out, their winnings are increased to $15,000. If they fail to do so, they leave with just the $1,000 from the Main Game.