OzHpv Challenge: The Board Game

Hi

Well I won't start on the topic, rather just write a bit of a catch-up and then launch into it.

First of all I've been a bit busy! My wife Christine is recovering from an operation and I've been to and from dentists and endodontists this week dealing with an abcess on the gum. That doesn't mean I haven't done things related to bikes, its just I haven't written about them yet.

For a while I've been helping my workmate Brad Jarvis build a trike (donating materials and advice). He's finished now and posted a bit about it on his web blog at http://emotorcycle.blogspot.com/ . Brad has helped me a lot, dragging this website from a small collection of stuff that I've written to something a bit more focussed and impressive. Thanks again Brad!

Well, back to the board game. I read a few Human Powered Vehicle websites quite regularly, among them
Velovision: http://www.velovision.co.uk/
Bentrideronline: http://www.bentrideronline.com/ and more recently
The Recumbent Journal: http://www.recumbentjournal.com/

Velovision posted a link to this wonderful site about Cycling Board Games.
http://www.cyclingboardgames.net/index.htm . It's not a type of game that's known about let alone used in Australia but this website lists hundreds of them, mainly European I think.

I stumbled across one Australian game on the site: http://www.cyclingboardgames.net/g_national.htm

There is a page about making your own board game, and more trivia than you would care to imagine.

Anyway, this got me to thinking: how about a boardgame based on the Ozhpv Challenge? This set of races has been held over about 10 years at Canberra, Broadford, Werribee and more recently Albury. The website for the Challenge is here http://ozhpv.org.au/events/challenge.html

Anyway I've started a small spreadsheet which sets up a premise for a game based on the challenge. It's here http://modularbikes.com.au/game/Boardgame.xls.

Basically the game would have 6 races and six different vehicles, all familiar to Challenge Entrants
Road Race
Off Road
Shopping Race
Slalom
Hill Climb
Time Trial

Road Bike
Mountain Bike
Lowracer Recumbent
Recumbent Trike
LWB Recumbent
Velomobile

Riders would progress a token across a board based on a roll of the dice. There might be 40 squares to progress through in a race.

There's a table in the spreadsheet with something like the most likely outcomes for the races given riders of equal ability, and the idea of the game is to simulate that likely outcome in each race using a set of "rigged dice" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice#Cheat_dice) The "average" roll of dice will lead to the expected result. Each vehicle has its good and bad races and it all averages out even in the end.

Of course nothing like this happens in the real version of the Challenge. The actual result in recent years has been:

* Someone comes along with a mountain bike and wins the Off Road (Tim Marquardt in recent years)

* Jamie Friday wins everything else and is once again crowned OzHpv Champion!

Regards

Steve Nurse