Sport of Kings. Part Two.

Having done more research on the Win, Place & Show board game, I discovered a set of magazines produced by Avalon Hill in the early 80's. The magazine was called All Stars and ran for just two or three years, being a quarterly publication. Scans of those magazines are freely available to download on the internet.

Someone far smarter than me wrote on article on how he and his group created a full season(s). Recording all the races, prize money, form book etc. and produced a system to create your own. I copied down the various tables as seen below. Table A & B allow you to create the running strength of every horse.

Using two d6, roll on Table A and place that number in the first box of the horse card. After that you roll seven more times on Table B, follow the instructions there i.e. If you roll 13 on Table A you write in 8 in the first box, next roll on Table B is a 16 which is minus 2, Eight minus two is six, so that goes into the next box and so on, simple and neat.

WPS uses a bonus number for every horse as well, Table C allows you to allocate these. Depending on the class of the horse. You roll three d6 and look down the column of what you rolled and match that with the class of the horse. So rolling a total of 12 for a horse Class 70's would give the bonus number of 8.

He also produced an odds calculator and even a speed time calculator to compare horses from different races.

Using index cards I quickly knocked up six horse cards, took the horse names from the daily paper then rolled as explained previously. With just six horses this has given a very satisfactory spread of Class and speed.

The best of the group is Whistling Sands with a Class of 104 and a bonus number of 7. The class is the total of all eight speed boxes. Capla Spirit is Class 88 and so on.

Poor old Robero with a Class of just 30 shouldn't even be in this race as he is totally outclassed. But with more horses created he will no doubt have company. The elite horses will of course be running in the elite races, so will face each other rather than a poor scrog.

Horse cards laid out in starting positions.

Sweet Talker is in Gate 1, the discs denote this horse's jockey is wearing a black cap and yellow silks.

The next job is to run the race, record what happens as that is important for any form book that is created as each race is run. I am not sure how many horses will be needed to have realistic season, but I foresee two to three hundred!

Well none of us are going anywhere soon are we?

The next post will show this race and the form book page it creates.