Alright, so let me tell you about this Kentucky Derby board game I whipped up. It all started a while back, I was looking for something fun to do, something a bit different, you know? And the Derby was on my mind – all that excitement, the hats, the horses. I thought, why not try and make a game out of it? Seemed like a laugh.
Getting Started – The Basic Idea
First things first, I needed a track. I wasn’t about to get all fancy with it. I dug out a big piece of poster board I had lying around from some other forgotten project. Drew a basic oval, you know, like a race track. Then I marked out spaces, enough for a decent race. Didn’t measure perfectly or anything, just eyeballed it. Good enough for a homemade game, I figured.
Then, the horses. I thought about carving little wooden ones, but man, that sounded like way too much work. So, I went simpler. Found some old bottle caps, different colors. Perfect! Each player could pick a color. Stuck some little paper flags on them with numbers, just to make them look a bit more like racehorses. Cheap and cheerful, that’s my motto sometimes.
Figuring Out the “How-To” – Rules and Movement
This was the tricky bit. How do the horses move? Just rolling a dice and moving that many spaces seemed a bit boring, too straightforward for the Derby. I wanted a bit more, you know, unpredictability.
So, here’s what I came up with:
- Movement Dice: Each player rolls two standard dice. But here’s the twist – you didn’t just add them up.
- Horse-Specific Movement: I made a little chart. Before the game, each horse (bottle cap) got randomly assigned a “favored number” from 2 to 12 (like the dice roll outcomes). If you rolled your horse’s favored number, you got a bonus move, like an extra three spaces. Made things interesting because some numbers are more likely to be rolled, right?
- “Jockey Whip” Cards: I made a small deck of cards. Simple stuff written on them like “Sudden Burst! Move 2 extra spaces” or “Stumbled! Move 1 space back.” You could draw one if you landed on certain “chance” spaces I marked on the track. Added a bit of chaos, which is always fun.
I spent a good afternoon just scribbling down these rules, tweaking them. First draft was a mess, too complicated. Had to simplify. My wife came in, looked at my notes, and just said, “Honey, no one’s gonna remember all that.” She was right, as usual. So, I cut it down to the basics.
Building the Actual Game
With the rules sort of figured out, I went back to the board. Used some markers to make it look a bit more like a track – a finish line, some “chance” spots, maybe a “water jump” spot where you miss a turn if you’re unlucky (just for kicks, no actual water involved, thankfully).
The cards were just index cards cut in half. Wrote the actions on them with a Sharpie. Nothing fancy, but it worked. The dice I just grabbed from an old Monopoly set.
Putting it all together:
- The poster board track.
- The bottle cap horses with their little number flags.
- Two dice.
- The handmade “Jockey Whip” cards.
- The simple rule sheet.
That was it. My Kentucky Derby board game was born. Took me maybe an afternoon and a bit of an evening, mostly fiddling with the rules until they felt right.
The First Race and What I Learned
Got a couple of friends over to try it out. It was a bit clunky at first. We realized some “favored numbers” were definitely better than others, so we added a little pre-game auction or draft for the horses to balance it out. That actually added a whole new layer of strategy, which was cool.
The “Jockey Whip” cards were a big hit. Everyone loved the randomness. One time, my buddy was way out in front, about to win, and he drew a “Horse spooked! Go back 5 spaces!” card. Oh, the groans! It was hilarious.
We played a few rounds, and it was genuinely good fun. Simple, a bit silly, but engaging. It wasn’t about super deep strategy, more about the luck of the dice and the cards, and just having a good time together. It felt good, making something with my own hands that people actually enjoyed. Even if it was just bottle caps on a piece of cardboard.
So yeah, that’s the story of my Kentucky Derby board game. Not a professional production by any means, but a pretty decent way to spend an afternoon and have some laughs. Sometimes the simple things are the best, aren’t they?
