Long and Winding Road

THIS GAME IS SUPPLIED BY LAMBOURNE GAMES AND IS NOT AVAILABLE AS PDF

Long Winding Road provides the chance to run a full season's Marathon Championship with the 141 men and 78 women each running 6 races during the year. You can choose from over 40 courses together with their Weather Modifiers. A Championship season of 12 races for men and 10 for women is suggested, so with each race taking about 2 1/2 hours playing time such a season would take around 60 hours to complete - well within the realms of possibility for many replay gamers if feedback from you is anything to go by.

The greatest compliment received about the game came from an actual marathon runner who said that the game captured the feel of the race perfectly! So what more do you want ??

Of course, individual races are possible and a 'trial' race is certainly recommended before embarking on a full season.

The aim has been to try to recreate the way in which actual Marathon events develop, with small groups of runners breaking away off the front of the main pack, and others losing ground off the back.

We recommend 40 to 70 starters, although the system can cope with larger numbers if necessary, and we deal with the race in 1 kilometre stages, so it would not be sensible or enjoyable to require a dice roll for every competitor each kilometre. With a field of 70 that would entail around 3000 dice rolls!

So we only concern ourselves with identifying those runners within each Group (in game terms a Group consists of any number of runners from one upwards occupying a single 10-second space of our Endless Track) who need their Rating checked for that particular kilometre of the race to see whether they stay with their present Group, or make a forward or backward movement - that is gain or lose around 10 seconds on their Group over this kilometre.

These checks are made with a single fast-action card regardless of how many within the Group require to be checked. But this fast-action card provides a different check for each runner, so the only dice rolling necessary is to establish which runners are checked, and we are talking about only 200-300 dice rolls for the entire race including those needed to check for Retirements, with each runner having their own individual Retirement Ratings for different stages of the race.

No individual runner book-keeping is necessary since stamina and individual running style (fast starter, strong middle race runner, late surger, etc) are built into the individual Runner Cards, and the only essential recording to be done is to keep a note of the individual kilometre times and the cumulative time, although we suspect that details of current leader and gap to the next runner, time splits for 5 and 10 kilometre stages, etc will be maintained by many gamers. And we supply a Race Control Sheet which we found useful in our own play-testing.

Kilometre times are based on the particular course's Basic Standard Time adjusted for the prevailing Weather conditions. Cool and/or wet is conducive to fast times, hot and humid slows everyone down. We considered including individual runner preference in relation to Weather conditions but rejected it finally on the grounds that it would complicate what is otherwise a fairly elegant and user-friendly game system for only a marginal increase in realism.

National, European, Commonwealth, and Asian Championships can be run within the context of the main season's Championship, plus a Team Championship on a race-by-race or full season basis.

Don't forget to maintain your liquid intake!