OT - Manufactured competitions (reflections on a youth without computers)

[QuikSand]

Since so many of us are fans of the text sim genre (I hope that's still trtue around here, at least), I suspect there will be plenty of things to contributwe to this theme.

I love competitions. Leagues, win/loss records, scores, stats, standings, championships, halls of fame, all that stuff. Playing computer football games and other sports sims is a great way to drop yourself into that environment, which we all love. No surprise.

Now, a lot of us grew up before computers were everywhere - but still had these passions. I know friends who played Bowl Bound for years on end, keeping detailed records of every game, and others who played Strat-o-Matic baseball for seasons on end. All fine and good.

I'm interested in even one level lower than that. Did anyone out there just sort of "invent" your own kind of competitions, just as a way of generating the stuff we love -- winners and losers, standings, records, stats, and so forth? Sports or otherwise, built on an actual game or not... what sort of stuff did you come up with, as a manifestation of your love of structured competitions?

[HornedFrog Purple]

I don't know if anyone remembers the Monday Night Football with the mini records that you popped into this fake radio, but I used to play that and keep stats.

I also invented a wrestling game with some regular dice and a quarter because I used to watch WCCW (world class championship wrestling) as a kid. I made up my own system and rolled dice to determine the moves and stuff... I played that for hours. And of course I kept track of wins and losses and who had the titles. The funny thing is WCCW actually did come out with a board game and one of my childhood's friend's father thought mine was better.

Yes there was not much to do in Zephyr but work on a farm.

[QuikSand]

I remember back in elementary school, I worked hard to finally collect a complete set of NFL-team pencils. (They were available for 5 cents at a machine at our school)

I have a vague recollection (this was about age 8 or 9) of playing some sort of game on my mother's glass coffee table. It involved spreading out all the pencils, and then flicking them into one ahother with the goal of knocking teams off the edge of the table. The teams that lasted longest got some kind of score, and it all went into a notebook of records I kept. Mom thought I was nuts, but it kept me quiet, at least.

[sabotai]

When I was younger, me and my neighbor would routinely create systems using dice or cards to decide football game, baseball, hockey, tennis, boxing basketball and auto racing. And usually we revised our system every few months.

In the cases of football and baseball, we would do it play-by-play (or pitch-by-pitch). Hockey was in 10 second "turns" as was boxing. Tennis, shot-for-shot. Basketball was possesion-for-possesion. With auto-racing, I had a Daytona 500 board game that we used combined with our system of dice and cards. I usually only got 1 or 2 seasons into it (with hockey, basketball and baseball, I used short seasons) before I would either move to something else or feel the need to revise it and start over.

No, my family didn't have much money when I was growing up.

[Franklinnoble]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

I remember back in elementary school, I worked hard to finally collect a complete set of NFL-team pencils. (They were available for 5 cents at a machine at our school)

I have a vague recollection (this was about age 8 or 9) of playing some sort of game on my mother's glass coffee table. It involved spreading out all the pencils, and then flicking them into one ahother with the goal of knocking teams off the edge of the table. The teams that lasted longest got some kind of score, and it all went into a notebook of records I kept. Mom thought I was nuts, but it kept me quiet, at least.

Mom was right.

[digamma]

What didn't I have a competition in?

I had a Step Ball League. I would play against the top of the stairs, but in my mind it was a tournament bracket, and with each win I would advance a round in the tournament.

My house had a path that went around the foyer through the dining room, kitchen and living room, back to the foyer. I treated like a track and would try to get around it in the quickets amount of time--race walking, of course. The parents loved that one.

Just using the stop watch, I would try to set records for how quickly I could start and stop the thing.

I set up a neighborhood olympics one year, complete with a number of different events and a medal ceremony.

I had a complete set of NFL HotWheels cars. I would race these from one end of my cedar chest to the other, keeping detailed records of who won each heat, etc.

Every time I threw the ball with my dad, it became a game. He would throw me grounders, pop-ups or line drives, and depending on how I handled them, runners would advance, or I would get them out.

I had all sorts of imaginary wrestling leagues with M.U.S.C.L.E.s.

I'll stop now, but I could go on and on. And these were all pre-computer simulation, which of course stepped things up a huge notch.

[albionmoonlight]

I have been waiting for this question my entire life.

I had matchbox cars when I was a kid. I would play demolition derby. The rules were--you put a car in each hand and rolled them into each other. If both cars or neither car ended up on its back, you resmash them until one is standing and the other is not. There were, of course, all sorts of ground rules relating to obsticles in my room--the details of which are not important here, but rest assured that they are about as detailed as you would imagine.

I had seen the NCAA tournament at that point, so I understood 64 bracket tournaments and would set the cars up in them. Later, I had the idea to play entire seasons and playoffs with the cars--complete with divisions and records and tie-breakers and the like (I still have the records of all of those seasons at home. Lots and lots of paper).

What made the game so addictive was the fact that the cars had different . . .styles and personalities. They were a diverse group of matchbox cars. Some were really heavy. Some were low to the ground. Some were taller and lighter. As you would expect, big heavy cars and cars low to the ground did a lot better in a "which car gets flipped over" contest than did cars modeled after, say, an Astrovan.

Because the cars had different abilities, the tournaments and seasons allowed for upsets. Just like Kentucky will beat UAB 9 time out of 10--the "top seeded" cars would win most of the time, but would lose just enough to keep it interesting. There were a group of about 5-10 cars that could always be expected to be in the mix at the end. However, there was always that random tournament or two when a car that had no earthly business being in the finals managed to make it there and win it all.

It was the closest thing to a simulated sports league that I have ever had.

[HornedFrog Purple]

I remember when I played this game. I am not sure there was ever an official name for it but it went something like this.

You took a sheet of graph paper and fold it in half. Then you and your opponent draw the same number of spaceships on each side. Then you each take turns making a dot on the back of your side of the sheet and press it hard enough so that it appeared on the opponents side. If you hit any part of the ship you draw a little crater or erase that part of it. Every ship had one square that was its reactor and if you hit that square the ship blew up.

It was sort of a weird version of battleship. But anyways the stats/competition part was keeping track of how many ships you blew up and how many times you won the game. It was a small group of us but we made a promotion system based on the number of ships you blew up total. Such as 50 ships = Captain, 75 ships=General and the highest one was like Super Admiral but no one ever got that high.

[sabotai]

albion reminded me of one I forgot. I would use matchbox cars and create a track out of either pencils or cards (cards when I didn't have enough pencils) and then race them around. The simpel rule was I would give it a little push and let it roll. If it hit another car or the wall, accident. Some cars rolled better than others, and would usually win. I remember one race I had this car lead the race the entire way by a good length. Another time, I created this enormous track all across my living room.

[Maple Leafs]

When I was a kid we'd spend weeks in the summer visiting my grandparents, who lived in small-town Quebec where there's not much of anything for an english kid to do.

To pass the time, I invented several sports game that I could play with dice. I still remember the baseball game, which started off simple and got more advanced as I tweaked it. Some years I would keep notebooks full of stats and rosters, and keep track of everyone's totals. I'd have schedules, lineups, even unqiue ballparks.

[digamma]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

I have been waiting for this question my entire life.

I had matchbox cars when I was a kid. I would play demolition derby. The rules were--you put a car in each hand and rolled them into each other. If both cars or neither car ended up on its back, you resmash them until one is standing and the other is not. There were, of course, all sorts of ground rules relating to obsticles in my room--the details of which are not important here, but rest assured that they are about as detailed as you would imagine.

I had seen the NCAA tournament at that point, so I understood 64 bracket tournaments and would set the cars up in them. Later, I had the idea to play entire seasons and playoffs with the cars--complete with divisions and records and tie-breakers and the like (I still have the records of all of those seasons at home. Lots and lots of paper).

This was one of the ways I wrestled MUSCLES. I had a little ring drawn on my desk and I would throw the two figures at one another. Whoever stayed in the ring was the winner. Ironically, this was one of the few things I didn't use in a bracket format. I played it more in a winner stays and is the reigning champion. I had records for the number of successful defenses.

[QuikSand]

To this day, I still think that the economist in me was born at the NFL pencil machine in front of Mr. Meade's office at Woodlands Elementary School.

One day, I put in a nickel, and expected to get my random pencil. The machine instead jammed somehow, and I got nothing. I asked the secretary in the office for help, and Mr. Meade came out to resolve the problem. He had the key to open the machine... and he asked me what team I wanted.

I was maybe seven years old. This was like paradise! I could get my beloved Miami Dolphins! I usually had to wait for them, or . . . or . . . trade for them...

"I'll take the Dallas Cowboys" came out of my mouth before I even had a chance to think about it.

I went off and found one of the many "America's team" saps around schol, and negotiated something like a three-for-one deal, getting not only my Dolphins, but probably something ratty like the Chiefs and Bears in the deal too. But it was a lesson learned. Supply and demand. Stupid Cowboys fans. It all came together.

[Maple Leafs]

Originally Posted by digamma

This was one of the ways I wrestled MUSCLES.

Were those the little pink figures, about an inch high?

[digamma]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

Were those the little pink figures, about an inch high?

Indeed.

[Maple Leafs]

Originally Posted by digamma

Indeed.

Sweet god, I had those! I'd completely forgotten about them. My favorite was the soccer ball dude, and the scrawny ref.

[QuikSand]

I used to make a tournament out of eating peanut M&Ms. I'd grab a handful of them, and that would be the competition for the contest. I would grab two at random, and push them together until one's shell started to crack. The loser, alas, gets eaten. The winner (the intect one) gets to take on another challenger. So it goes until the whole handful is eaten.

For what it's worth - it seems the winner or each contest gets slightly weakened with the stress, and one M&M can rarely winmore than two or three contests. But occasionally you get some weird-shaped ones that are like killer rocks.

Oh yeah... I should be speaking in the past tense. Right.

It was a handful of peanut M&Ms earlier today that got me thinking about starting this thread...

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by Maple Leafs

To pass the time, I invented several sports game that I could play with dice. I still remember the baseball game, which started off simple and got more advanced as I tweaked it.

I have to think I'm not the only (former) kid here who tried to make up a baseball game using dice and the stats on the back of the card...

[JAG]

My younger brother and I used to race Matchbox cars down one of those PlaySchool slides for my youngest brother. We would have 5 sets of qualifying heats of five at a time, removing whichever car made it least far to the next part of the qualifying until we were down to one car, which made it to the finals. After we had five cars for the finals, they raced off in similar fashion until we had a grand winner. We each took ownership of different cars and had a few neutral ones thrown in there as well. You could usually count on about 4 or 5 to have the best chance to win it all. My parents eventually replaced the floors that had had these cars repeatedly banging into them.

[JAG]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

I used to make a tournament out of eating peanut M&Ms. I'd grab a handful of them, and that would be the competition for the contest. I would grab two at random, and push them together until one's shell started to crack. The loser, alas, gets eaten. The winner (the intect one) gets to take on another challenger. So it goes until the whole handful is eaten.

For what it's worth - it seems the winner or each contest gets slightly weakened with the stress, and one M&M can rarely winmore than two or three contests. But occasionally you get some weird-shaped ones that are like killer rocks.

Oh yeah... I should be speaking in the past tense. Right.

It was a handful of peanut M&Ms earlier today that got me thinking about starting this thread...

That's right, whenever my younger brother and I each got packs of M&M's (usually at the grandparents' house), we would each arrange them in order of best to worst color (green, orange, yellow, brown, black) and see who had more of each. Fun stuff.

[Maple Leafs]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

I have to think I'm not the only (former) kid here who tried to make up a baseball game using dice and the stats on the back of the card...

Mine was more simple. If I remember right, I'd roll two dice for each pitch -- even was a ball, odd was a strike. A seven was a hit, which would trigger another roll to see what happened. As I went on, I started adding modifiers for especially good or bad hitters (I had to make sure Jesse Barfield got his HRs, after all).

The thing that stands out in my memory is how quickly I could play through a game. I became quite adept at rolling dice, reading the number, and grabbing the dice to roll again, all in one motion (with my right hand, while my left hand noted the result on the scorecard). More than once an adult would wander over to see what I was doing and leave, shaking their head.

[rkmsuf]

Originally Posted by sabotai

albion reminded me of one I forgot. I would use matchbox cars and create a track out of either pencils or cards (cards when I didn't have enough pencils) and then race them around. The simpel rule was I would give it a little push and let it roll. If it hit another car or the wall, accident. Some cars rolled better than others, and would usually win. I remember one race I had this car lead the race the entire way by a good length. Another time, I created this enormous track all across my living room.

I have been waiting for this question my entire life.

I had matchbox cars when I was a kid. I would play demolition derby. The rules were--you put a car in each hand and rolled them into each other. If both cars or neither car ended up on its back, you resmash them until one is standing and the other is not. There were, of course, all sorts of ground rules relating to obsticles in my room--the details of which are not important here, but rest assured that they are about as detailed as you would imagine.

I had seen the NCAA tournament at that point, so I understood 64 bracket tournaments and would set the cars up in them. Later, I had the idea to play entire seasons and playoffs with the cars--complete with divisions and records and tie-breakers and the like (I still have the records of all of those seasons at home. Lots and lots of paper).

What made the game so addictive was the fact that the cars had different . . .styles and personalities. They were a diverse group of matchbox cars. Some were really heavy. Some were low to the ground. Some were taller and lighter. As you would expect, big heavy cars and cars low to the ground did a lot better in a "which car gets flipped over" contest than did cars modeled after, say, an Astrovan.

Because the cars had different abilities, the tournaments and seasons allowed for upsets. Just like Kentucky will beat UAB 9 time out of 10--the "top seeded" cars would win most of the time, but would lose just enough to keep it interesting. There were a group of about 5-10 cars that could always be expected to be in the mix at the end. However, there was always that random tournament or two when a car that had no earthly business being in the finals managed to make it there and win it all.

It was the closest thing to a simulated sports league that I have ever had.

Dudes this is scary. I bet I can still find notebooks hanging around with my car point standings and a box of popsicles sticks in it used for the track.

[Hammer755]

The last time I was at my parents' house, I went through my old room, where I haven't lived in over 10 years. In one of the dresser drawers, I came across a spiral notebook where I had kept game-by-game and tabulated stats from seasons that I had played in the original NES Tecmo Bowl.

I also remember doing the same thing with RBI Baseball, but I didn't find the book where I kept the baseball stats. I still remember calculating the players stats by hand - for some reason at the time I thought that a fielder's choice counted the same as a sacrifice bunt, so all of the guys had ridiculously high batting averages, even for a NES game.

[Wolfpack]

A flood of childhood memories. I sometimes used the MUSCLE guys for wrestling, but I actually constructed an entire football league around them. Had a electric football field that had lost most of its players and used that for the playing field, though I think I turned it into an arena league field of 50 yards rather than 100, though the width was still the same. No real rules governance about how play unfolded. I think I used a die, but it's hazy. I think it was four or five to a side since they were so big compared to the field. I even created "newspapers" that had standings and even a drawing to mimic a photograph one might see in the paper. I think I did at least a couple of years of that.

Invented basketball leagues using a Nerfoop, with some rules as it was me against myself, but I was playing different players on the team (3vs3, I think). I think the play flow was a long range shot, followed by a medium, followed by an in-close attempt (representing the guard, forward, and center). If a shot was made, change possession to the other team; it's their turn. If all three were missed, the other team got a fast-break that resulted in a dunk usually. Me being the geography nut that I am, I also created trophies for each of the divisions in the league that resembled the ACC trophy (outline of the states that have ACC teams with stars where the teams are located).

Let's see...what else? I created a small soccer league using a deck of playing cards dictating the scoring by half. 2-9 (or 10, can't remember) scored nothing, 10-J was 1 goal, Q-K was 2 goals, and drawing an ace resulted in 3 goals. Teams, based on prior year's performance, could modify the value of the card so that better teams were more likely to win. Made up team logos and everything. New York Knights, Baltimore Harbor Side, West Palm Beach Raiders, LA Stars, San Antonio Lone Stars, New England Britons.... I actually expanded the league to 12 and put in relegation.

Oh, yeah, also did the Matchbox/Hot Wheels racing thing. Usually some sort of downhill side-by-side race (driveway across the street from my house was smooth and long enough but not too long for such things) or using a Hot Wheels garage set which had a large swooping 'S'-curve from top to bottom and using a stopwatch that was built into my watch.

Good stuff.

[Franklinnoble]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

To this day, I still think that the economist in me was born at the NFL pencil machine in front of Mr. Meade's office at Woodlands Elementary School.

One day, I put in a nickel, and expected to get my random pencil. The machine instead jammed somehow, and I got nothing. I asked the secretary in the office for help, and Mr. Meade came out to resolve the problem. He had the key to open the machine... and he asked me what team I wanted.

I was maybe seven years old. This was like paradise! I could get my beloved Miami Dolphins! I usually had to wait for them, or . . . or . . . trade for them...

"I'll take the Dallas Cowboys" came out of my mouth before I even had a chance to think about it.

I went off and found one of the many "America's team" saps around schol, and negotiated something like a three-for-one deal, getting not only my Dolphins, but probably something ratty like the Chiefs and Bears in the deal too. But it was a lesson learned. Supply and demand. Stupid Cowboys fans. It all came together.

I love you, man.

[sabotai]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

To this day, I still think that the economist in me was born at the NFL pencil machine in front of Mr. Meade's office at Woodlands Elementary School.

Isn't it weird looking back to things that seemed small at the time, but they ended up basically shaping a really big part of your life?

The historian in me was born when I rented this game from the local video store called Ghengis Khan of the NES. Because of that simple, nearly random event, I am a history buff, use a mongol general's name as my handle, and am generally fascinated with all of the "barbarians" in history.

The role-playing fanatic also started the same way. In the local video store, just browsing on a Friday after school. Looking for something to rent for the weekend, I saw this game I never heard of before called Final Fantasy. I didn't breathe fresh air again until Monday morning.

With programming and test sims in general, my parents bought a computer for my dad's business. On it was this thing called QBASIC (I had previously tought myself the version of BASIC on the C64, but that was at the time a fad, since it had been years since my C64 even worked that my parents got this computer). I thought it would be rather neat to make little programs to help move my games along. It took me a long time to do games in some sports, so having programs do it in seconds rather than minutes would be really cool.

I know a lot of people start programming because they simply get a computer, but for me the idea of doing the games was really the motivation for me to learn it. Plus that I had previously leaned the version of BASIC on the C64 because one day I was flipping through the c64 manual and started reading about it. The reason I started all of these systems goes back to summer vacation one year. I had a deck of cards, preseason football had just started, and I was bored. So I took a card at a time, and used it for the score for one period. So I would turn over a 4 and that would be team's 1 score for the first period. Next would be a 9, and that's team's 2 score for the 1st period. And I would do that for 4 quarters. And that was what started me creating systems.

So if you think about it, the biggest parts of my life (history, role-playing games (and with that sci-fi and fantasy, and with that the desire to write my own sci-fi and fantasy), and most importantly programming) was all started because as a kid I flipped through a book, randomly picked 2 games to rent, and was bored one day on summer vacation with a deck of cards.

Of course, a lot of that probably would have happened anyway considering other events (especially the programming), but it's still kind of cool to speculate what things would have been like if I didn't have that deck of cards, or if that game had already been rented by the time I got there, or if that C64 manual hadn't been sitting there or if I wasn't curious to see what was in there.

[Suicane75]

I forget the game, but it was for NES, maybe RBI Baseball, I would name the teams, keep the stats of the players and play all the games, over the cours of a summer I had played 3 or 4 162 game seasons and had notebooks full of boxscores and leaderboards and what not.

I also did the wrestling thing, I would take 3 dice and make up cards, I would then weight the wrestlers, giving the best ones a pre determined number of points going in so it was favorable that they would win, I would then wrestle the matches with me as 1 guy and my Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy as the other one, I still remember coming with something called a "pint" match between the Skyscraper and The Road Warriors where the winning team was the one that filled a jar up with a pint of it's opponents blood, useing a couple of tubes of fake blood i was able to mess my room up pretty damn good, but man was it fun.

I would also simulate the NFL by making out a schedule and useing playing cards, I would use the 3, 7, & 10 cards, face cards were 0 points, the joker was 13 points, I would then give each team a card for all 4 quarters and add it up to determine the final score, I would do this all time but the ones i remember best were the saturday night before the NFL season started as I would sit in bed listening to a random AM sports station doing NFL previews.

[Professor58]

I came up with a real simple hockey game. You would play 3 periods. Each period would be a roll of a die. Roll 1 - 1 goal, 2 - 2 goal period, 3 - 3 goal period, 4,5,or 6 was 0 goals for that period. With paper and pencil I would keep track of the original six team standings. Thing I remember most was trying to erase the W-L without making a hole in the paper.

[sabotai]

Thing I remember most was trying to erase the W-L without making a hole in the paper.

I had to rewrite so many things because of eraser torn paper.

[MJ4H]

Man I made up so many of these types of games it is scary. I used to do the racing thing, but with pennies I would slide across the bar top. I used to simulate entire decades of a fictional baseball league using dice (by myself). I invented something remarkably similar to curling, which I had never heard of at the time, using a kitchen floor and little round parts of some toy or game, I don't even remember (and of course, an associated "league" emerged). I used to make a "league" out of a really stupid solitaire game I made up with a deck of cards that pitted all four suits against one another (I always rooted for clubs - still my favorite suit and this is totally arbitrary).

I also began programming computers (on an apple ][) solely for the purpose of making some of this silly little dice games and the like into something less cumbersome and more robust. My first project was a BASIC program that simulated NBA seasons and even featured random trades! The algorithm for that game was pretty stupid, but my friends and I had a blast watching the games unfold.

The algorithm was basically this: every player in the nba had a PPG avg. in a given game, their production was calculated as being 75-125% of their current PPG value. A team's score is then just a total of each player's production. After each 10 games, PPG values were recalculated based on the last 10 games performance. And trades would happen from time to time. I had like a 1 in something chance of a trade happening after a given game. Then two players from different teams were randomly(!) chosen to be traded. Made for some jaw-droppers of course. It was far from perfect, but as a first big programming project I was proud of it, and my friends LOVED it.

[CentralMassHokie]

Along the lines of some here, my friend and I had competing wrestling federations using G.I. Joe guys. We'd each setup matches and competitions, had our own champions, and then once in a while would have a mega-card where our champions would fight each other. We went as far as to build a super cage out of Construx and have injured G.I. Joe guys (ones who's elastics had snapped and we hadn't had time to put back together) become interviewers.

At school, anytime we had an indoor recess (which, in New England winters, is a lot), we'd play table-top football (the little paper wedge you flick and try to hang over the edge of the desk). We had like a 6 or 8 person league, with a regular season, playoffs, and a "checks" for the champion and runner up. I was the winningest player in history, winning the big prize twice and coming in second a third time.

Of course, that's not to mention the hours and hours drafting teams in the early EA Sports games that allowed you to draft teams (Lakers vs. Bulls, maybe) and watching our creations play each other. Tom Chambers was unstoppable.

[QuikSand]

I also recall putting all my mini football helmets (from the quarter vending machines) to good use and starting an actual football league using them. In time, I discovered that you could do two things with the little helmets:

-you could flick downward on the back of the helmet with a proper touch, and it would launch forward a few inches, roll onto its back, and then reset itself upright ... about 2/3 of the time

-you could flick downward really hard on the back of the helmet, and the helmet would flick forward between 6 and 24 inches in the air (just barely off the floor) with a modest amont of accuracy

I decided in time that these two things would become rushing and passing in my football league. I don't recall exactly how I made it work, but I remember playing football games using the helmets against one another -- flicking helmets forward to represent a running back rushing with the ball, flicking others toward it to represent would-be tacklers, and later hard-flicking a QB-helmet in the direction of a WR-helmet in an attempt to complete a pass.

I remember laying out masking tape all across our hardwood floor to mark the yard lines and out-of-bounds markers.

[QuikSand]

I came up with a ton of these once I got into programming as well. Ah ... Atari BASIC... I can almost remember some of those PEEK and POKE locations to this day.

I created one very cool sit-and-watch game, I recall. I had established a game with a variety of figures representing swordfighters, who would battle one another on a left-to-right display (simple stuff, really). Each fighter had some characteristics for aggression, strength, and defense - that sort of thing. The game basically just rolled lots of dice and showed what happened with a little animation.

I spent some time doing some research, and entered in all the great swordsmen from history and mythology, including many of the Knights of the Round Table, legends from various mythologies, and so forth. Achilles was a bitch to injure, Odysseus was an aggressive madman, Sir Lancelot was excellent overall... it was great. (Raiko... Gray Mouser...Beowulf... all the greats were in there)

I set the whole thing up as a random selection, double-elimination tournament. Two names drawn at random, and they fight. Once a fighter loses twice, he's out. Even the winner would carry on with some of the injuries he sustained in the fight. At the end, there would be a Top Ten list created based on how many wins each fighter had in the whole thing -- so not getting your name drawn often meant you lasted longer, but didn't rack up victory points for the final standings.

I'd give $100 right now to be able to go home and play that game again.

[albionmoonlight]

I used to wrestle my He-Man figures against each other. If you beat a guy, you got to keep his arm and use it in the next match, which was a pretty cool touch.

[Radii]

oh dear.

I had the entire national league schedule on the back of a 1985 NL review book, and I invinted simple dice games to resolve each game, something akin to point spreads or handicapping, giving the better team bonuses to their rolls, things like that.

We didn't keep notebook paper around the house, so I used the inside and back cover to my books to keep track. Many would consider that blasphemous I'm sure, but I was a math geek, I cared not for books back then.

I played basketball in the back yard and would use my stopwatch to time games. I'd play by myself, forcing myself to take difficult shots, lots of turnarounds and stuff, and I'd have to take it back past the FT line after each shot. If I did something(I forget what, I think it involved the rocks scattered around the yard) then a foul occured, and if I was about to take a shot, I'd take a weird double clutch shot to simulate the chance for a 3 point play. I made up the rules and would play out the entire NCAA tournament this way. I was totally fair except for the fact that UNC somehow won every time they played.

My sister and I played baseball games... we'd take a tennis ball into the street and take turns, a half inning was having to field one ground ball, one line drive and one pop up(just thrown by the other) and having to throw it back within 5 seconds if the ball was dropped. No league or anything, but we would go outside and play that constantly.

Once I learned BASIC I wrote a simple text sim to allow me to play duke vs UNC in college basekball. i hard coded the lineups and ratings, and eventually added subs and fatigue I think, very very simplistic though. I tried to do an entire ACC tournament via my game but tracking down all the stats and entering them all in was too tedious.

dice games to simulate the ACC tournament, but prettysimple ones, that I played all the time.


oh and of course the tennis ball on the front porch steps, many games were invented while throwing the ball at the steps, but none were better or more serious than the "run like hell when you miss b/c the ball hitting the aluminum front door really pissed off the parents" game

[grdawg]

I did the dice thing also, rolling a dice for each inning and playing 9 inning games and keeping standings.

I also used to predict every MLB game, I would cut out the pitching logs each day, circle the team I thought would win, and keep stats on how I did weekly, monthly, overall. I kept all the clippings in a binder, that I still have today. I still predict the games, but now do it in Access (so much easier)

Additionally I used to play MicroLeague Baseball on my Apple IIC, I'd print out all the boxscores and manually prepare leaders pages.

[fantastic flying froggies]

We really are a bunch of geeks !

I used to 'sim' all major soccer events, in many different ways. I simmed an entire season of french 1st division soccer (all 380 games of it) by kicking a ball against a wall... I played using little lego men. I simmed soccer games using marbles...

I simmed the cycling Tour de France with marbles and dice and plastic cyclers...

I simmed volley ball games banging a hot air balloon against the wall...

I simmed a fictionnal football league throwing and catching a football...

I created a fictionnal basketball league of 12 teams, drafted real players and then played games by myself anywhere I could find a basket...

And I even designed a Pirates game using a ping pong table...

I obviously don't remember all the rules I had for all those games, but those were the days...

[JonInMiddleGA]

It's always fun to see threads like these pop up amongst sports gamers. And I don't think there's any single thing we share more strongly than these made up games.

Football, baseball, and basketball were most often played with a card game. I have no idea who made them but I must have played those things for something like 15 years. (Naturally you knew what was coming since you recognized the tears, creases, etc. in each card). I ditched the rules for their use (made for 2-player) almost immediately & went to random 1d6 determinations for play selection, shot selection, etc.

I also had several variations of auto-racing with 2d6's, modified by a few house rules to cover accidents, mechanical failure, pit stops & such. Had another auto-racing variant that made use of matchbox cars & a braided rug (had that conversation last week, someone on another forum mentioned what a great oval track braided rugs made) Also had a 2d6 baseball game that pretty much was "my game" for years. I've still got a lot of my notebooks & stuff, a pretty good selection of Street&Smiths/ Sporting News college hoops & football annuals with my results noted on the schedules.

I'm not absolutely sure, but I think I was probably enjoying it more back then (but even then I had a lot of grognard characteristics, or at the very least, I could have been fairly described as being stat-obsessed).

[Desnudo]

I luckily had a dad who was in love with technology so always had a computer sitting around, starting with the TI 99 4/A. I also lucked out in that I came of age right when the first Microleague baseball game came out. So I never had to invent anything. I don't think I would have had the willpower to do something like that anyhow.

[Easy Mac]

This probably didn't count, but I used to try to sim an entire baseball season by thowing a tennis ball against the steps of my house. I'd usually get through 2 or 3 games a day. I'd keep all the stats, records... depending on how the ball bounced. If I caught it on the fly, it was an out, over my head, depended on how far it flew. I think I got through 50 games for each team one season. Needless to say I can't throw a baseball for more than 10 minutes anymore without my arm falling off.

I also did the same thing for Basketball on the basketball goal... but the ball kept hopping the fence and landing in the neighbor's pool.

[Maple Leafs]

I also had a pretty neat little hockey sim game I could play using only a calculator with a "random" button. It was great during math class. One day a friend caught me and asked what I was doing, so I showed him how it worked. So then he started playing. Pretty soon about a half dozen guys in the class were playing calculator hockey pretty much non-stop. Stunningly, this did not cause all the girls to want us.

I also seem to remember some sort of hockey game played with a digitial stopwatch that involved trying to get it to stop at exactly 1.00 seconds.

[Dutch]

Holy Cow, this is pretty scary. I thought I was the only one on the planet that made up games like this...

I still have a 35 year NFL universe that I have recorded every single game (massive eraser marks and all!). I made up the schedules, I kept record of the standings, and even added 2 expansion teams (the Richmond Vandals and the Memphis or Nashville something-or-others).

All teams would be rated from 0 to 20 on their strength. Each victory gave them 1 strength point and each loss took away 1 strength point. At the end of the year, it all started over and each team received points based on total number of victories (including playoffs).

The games were played vertically on college-rule notebook paper. Each line represented one cast of a d20 and a d12 dice combo. Roll a 20 and you get a FG, role a 12 and you get a TD, roll a 20 and a 12 and the team received the all coveted 10 points in one block, sometimes a team would come from 10 points down on the last roll of the game...enough to make me cheer and have the folks asking why my homework was making me cheer!

Each score allowed you to fill in two "zero's" into the opponents column (basically taking away 2 scoring chances). So every time a team scored, it was considered their "momentum".

The team strengths altered the generic penalty. If the Pittsburg Steelers had a strength of 17 and they were playing the Dallas Cowboys with a strength of 10, they had a +7 advantage for that game and that meant if the Steelers scored they had a longer run of dice rolls before the Cowboys could roll again. And if they scored enough and in proper sequence, the Cowboys might only get 5 or 10 rolls the entire game while the Steelers would probably get all of theres (I think it was around 30 or 40 rolls at the beginning of the game). I think there were a couple +18 and +19 games played, they were always fun, especially when I added the upstart expansion teams that did not receive break #1....they both started at a strength of "0" and I think they won 2 or 3 games total that year...hehe...

Of course upsets happened all the time, it wasn't perfect, but it did generate quite a few back to back championships and even created teams that were a glutton for punishment at the bottom of the standings.

Of course, my Beloved Buccaneers (the motivation behind the entire thing) only managed to get to one Super Bowl and lost to the San Diego Chargers 38-0......man was I pissed. We were favored....favored! Oh well, anyway, that 35 years of simulation basically ruined me from 7th - 9th grade...

[Senator]

I made a horse racing game with dice and old programs my dad gave me when we would go to Ruidoso Downs.

We had many acres and most was unmowed. We had these stickers where several grew on a stalk. During spring and summer I would take my football and create a football game where I would throw the ball forward and catch it. If a sticker got in my sock, I was tackled. If two stickers got me, it was incomplete. If no stickers got me, I zig zagged through the mine field until one stuck me.

I played complete seasons of the NFL using Topps football cards. I would line up all 11 on 11 and roll dice to see the results. Then I would enact the play. I have mountains of notebooks keeping records of this. The cards soon became destroyed but luckily I had duplicates of most, so my rookie Walter Payton is still safe and sound. Two of them, actually.

My cousin and I played the complete season of baseball using the back of the cards. He always had the A's and would beat me.

I had an olympic type environment set up around the neighborhood based on age categories. I had several sprinting events and an obstacle course. If a person thought he or she could break a record, we would gather and time it using a stopwatch. This went on for at least a decade, and I still have people email me to see if they still held the record in an event.

I made a dice game using a 20 sided, with the World Class Championship Wrestling people, making a list of moves and belts that was pretty popular among my friends and family. HFP - did you think you were the only one?

I played tennis against a garage door, after reading a Peanuts cartoon, and thought it was a good idea. If I could return the ball 4 times, I got the point. The caveat was I had to hit it harder each time. I was on the honor system. Which, I guess, most these games were.

When I was 12, I thought I could beat the Guiness World Records for situps. I created a press conference with the family, and then began my great assault. I think the record was like 10,000 or something. I don't even know if I got to 500.

I had this little guy that you would pop on the top of his head and he would kick field goals at different lengths. I had a summer where my cousins and I battled for the Tom Dempsey award. We got really good at it.

My cousin and I also would set up shoe boxes at the end of his wooden floor. Then we would set up 100-200 army men in front of them. Then we had 10 marbles each. Whoever knocked the most down, won. It was pretty fun to an 8 year old.

We would use Rock'em Sock'em Robots to re-enact the Ali fights.

I made an olympic events dice game where I had let's say, 10 columns marked off on a piece of paper. Each row had a different guy with a different nationality and name. I would roll the dice and that is how far each guy progressed down the imaginary track. I would do the play by play as it happened.

/Lonely child - but NEVER EVER bored.

[Dutch]

/Lonely child - but NEVER EVER bored.

Amen, brother!

[Scholes]

I had Nintendo at a young age... but that just didn't do it for me. To unrealistic. I didn't have a computer so I didn't know of the wonderful things that could be done with them.

I played card hockey... I made a net out of Legos and a large rink surrounded by boxes and set a hockey card of, say, Mike Liut in net so he covered most of it. Then I would put the first two lines out, grab my little tin-foil ball and go to it, shooting and passing the ball with the cards. I made a draft league, which confused me at first I remember because all of the hockey cards had players with different jerseys, but then the teams became familiar. Steve Yzerman, shunned in the first round by Providence, who chose Rick Tocchet instead, was the all-time leading point getter and led his Duluth squad to a bunch of titles. I even made every high-school hockey team in Minnesota (that I knew of, upwards of 100) out of cardboard and played out huge tournaments, with my hometown always "mysteriously" winning.

The only downside to this game was that it destroyed all my hockey cards, including my Mario Lemieux rookie, which had become so flimsy from use that I had to scotch tape around it. I said it was surgery. Oh well.

I also played two full seasons with the Pursue the Pennant boardgame, one with the Giants (88') and one with the Blue Jays (90'). I lost in the league championship series in both. I still do have, however, the scorecards from Will Clark's cycle and Tom Browning's no-hitter against me framed and at my parents' house somewhere.

I love how a lot of us complain about realism in sports games but grew up playing games like these and loving them.

[Buccaneer]

QS, a quick answer to your question for me would be a resounding YES. My parents might say that was how I spent most of my youth (in my room, with three-binders, cards, dice, stratego pieces, etc.). Come to think of it, nothing has changed. This weekend I'll detail some of the competition I engaged in, some would go back to items not seen since the early 1970s. With my anti-stats bias, I would keep the games simple so I could "watch" the league teams and structures.

[Dutch]

Bucc - I was the same way. My world had no 1,000 yard rushers or super star quarterbacks. Just franchises that rose to greatness and then collapsed and then rose again. The only stats to speak of were wins, losses, and scores.

[TLK]

Damn....

-Had a full WWF promotion using wrestling cards and the wrestling ring for those big rubber figures.... Always had an equal number of good guys and bad guys. I'll always remember when the NWA put out trading cards and Ric Flair made his WWF debut attacking Hulk Hogan, only to be saved by Hillbilly Jim...

-Ran entire Indycar seasons with a notebook and pencil

-Built a makeshift hockey arena and then had a 6 team draft with all of my hockey cards. Ran a season with many trades and some free agents moves. Also did this with basketball, but it wasn't as fun......

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Scholes

I even made every high-school hockey team in Minnesota... out of cardboard ...

I'm loving it ... "cardboard fillers", or as I called them "placeholders" were a big part of the baseball card component of my homemade 2d6 game. I recall quite fondly at the moment how tough it was figuring out which rookies would get "carded" into the rosters of my various teams.

Originally Posted by scholes

I love how a lot of us complain about realism in sports games but grew up playing games like these and loving them.

I'm not sure that we didn't have more realism our way than some of today's games -- after all, we had complete control over them as kids, if something didn't fit "reality", who among us didn't occasionally ... ahem ... "alter" the results. It's amazing how many re-rolls became neccessary sometimes

Originally Posted by senator

We had these stickers where several grew on a stalk. During spring and summer I would take my football and create a football game where I would throw the ball forward and catch it. If a sticker got in my sock, I was tackled. If two stickers got me, it was incomplete. If no stickers got me, I zig zagged through the mine field until one stuck me.

I didn't have much room, nor did I have stickers. But the fallen leaves in part of my grandparents yard were would-be tacklers for several college football seasons.

Originally Posted by easymac

This probably didn't count, but I used to try to sim an entire baseball season by thowing a tennis ball against the steps of my house.

AFAIC, if you were having fun & it was generating sports results in the process ... IT COUNTS !

Originally Posted by easymac

... but the ball kept hopping the fence and landing in the neighbor's pool.

Umm ... what did she look like?

[panerd]

Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA

I'm not sure that we didn't have more realism our way than some of today's games -- after all, we had complete control over them as kids, if something didn't fit "reality", who among us didn't occasionally ... ahem ... "alter" the results. It's amazing how many re-rolls became neccessary sometimes

In 5th and 6th grade me and my buddy used to spend hours a day recreating MLB playing APBA. But instead of ever playing each other we would each simulate a league and then play each other in the world series. I can remember the '84 or '85 season we both had our favorite players (who were not stars at all) His was Howard Johnson of the Tigers and mine was David Anderson of the Dodgers. It was amazing how these mediocore players led the league in basically everything. And when one of us was playing with their favorite team you always knew they were "effecting the outcome", but you never really wanted to know. (Kind of like your college roommate masturbating in the shower ) re-rolls, you bet all the time!

[panerd]

As far as games that we created. Me and my friends made up a wrestling game where we each drafted 10 wrestlers and then they were ranked from 30 to 1. The ranking was how many dice your wrestler got to roll. (about the only thing the board game Liar's dice was ever good for) Whoever had the higher sum got a one higher ranking. (Only if they beat someone with a higher ranking)

I can still remember George the Animal Steele defeating Virgil even though Virgil had like 15 more dice then Steele. "GAS" quickly became a legend and a joke that none of our friends ever understood when we would cheer for him in his squash matches. Other losers in real life who became favorites of ours due to the game were the Conquistadors.

On a side note, isn't it funny how knowledgable we became from these games and how some of the nobodies in real life became our favorite players. I remember Juan Samuel had a 14* in APBA so I knew all about him (height, hometown, nickname) when my uncle took me to a Phillies/Cardinals game. My uncle thought I was like the most knowledgeable kid ever.