Whoever buzzes in first gets the first shot at it. If you miss, the next guy to buzz in gets a shot. If you miss the answer, you lose the number of dollars that the question is worth. Of course, the game has a few rather interesting twists. Each person is issued a flathead screw at the beginning of each round.
Questions come in three general flavors.
Standard multiple choice questions, with four possible answers. These can get pretty tricky, and pretty strange. You may also be faced with a Gibberish Question, which is a rhyming word scramble. The host gives you clues for the answer, but the longer you take to answer it, the less money you get. Here's where the host separates the true gamesters from the pretenders.