Sport of Kings

First blog post in quite some time. In these difficult times with the world going into lock down, no going out to the pub, no sport to watch, live or on television, and having to stay in the house and self isolate for the foreseeable future. It calls for a little ingenuity to at least get some sport, albeit in board game form.

I have always enjoyed watching horse racing, both flat and jumps and last year I managed to acquire a second hand copy of Grand National (GN), it is an excellent game and I really like the mechanics of the game, no rolling of dice, very tactical as you are the jockey and have to decide on how you run the race.

All good stuff, but it only covers one unique race, run on a specific course just once a year. I wanted something more. Within the last couple of weeks I purchased another second hand racing game, Win, Place & Show (WPS). I had seen a play through of the game on You Tube and liked what I saw and immediately realised the possibilities for being able to run any meeting, jumps or flat.

The two boards GN furthest from camera, is a really lovely board that captures Aintree Racecourse perfectly. The board for WPS is rather more spartan and functional, but is of a similar size and so perfect for my needs.

It is designed for flat racing in the USA, but no problem, I can soon adapt it for British racing. It has start positions for one and a quarter miles (1m 2f), six furlongs and five furlongs. I had already realised that the number of spaces between the start of the 6f and the 5f races were exactly 10 spaces on the board. So each space represents One Chain or 22 yards. As every schoolboy knows ten chains equates to one furlong, so finding a start point for any length of race will be a simple task. It appears the each bend equates to one furlong, though there are more than ten spaces, a quirk of having to make a sharp 180 degree turn, but not a problem as long a you take that into consideration when working out start lines for different lengths of race.

The beautiful GN board didn't need to worry about that, just one start line, twice around the track and then turn at the Elbow to hit the finishing straight.

WPS come with just six horses, very basic but functional and do the job.

However, six horses will not be enough for what I have planned.

GN comes with 24 pre painted horses, much more suited to my needs.

They fit onto the spaces perfectly.

The extra horses to allow me to run much bigger fields.

The GN track/board has, as well as fences, some horse shoes printed on the track lanes, this is crucial for how GN works, remember it uses no dice. When you finish your turn on a fence or a horse shoe, you draw a card from the relevant deck of cards and execute the instructions it shows.

As the WPS track will be used for all races flat and jumps, I will simply add a coloured sticker in similar fashion to the GN board. They will come into effect for jump racing but be ignored for flat racing when the WPS movement system will be used instead.

WPS comes with six of these programs, very neat and give a lot of information.

Of course every race has just six runners, though three different distances of race are in play.

I won't go into details on how movement works, but if you look at Gunsmoke in the first race, below the purse money for the finishing places will be seen a string of numbers. With 11 twice this horse is a fast starter, with two 9's he begins to slow in the middle of the race and with a 2 and a 1 he tails off dramatically at the end of the race. Other factors do come into moving the horses with bonus movement and dice rolling, but that is the basics.

As discussed, I will be using the GN system for jump races and as such will need to create whole new decks of cards not specific to the Grand National, but suitable for any jump race. That will be very easy, if a little time consuming to do, but hey, we ain't going anywhere soon are we?

New cards will have to be made for all horses, both for flat and jumps and a way figured to give speed points, pace, stamina etc.

A couple of race cards from the recent Cheltenham Festival meeting, this gives me real horses, form, jockeys and lots of other useful information to create my own race cards.

I could even go down the route of using the performance of the horses in my races to create a form book of my own. Now that would be a fun project.