I love the Olympics. The national pride, the pomp and circumstance, and the events you never see outside of the Games (seriously, we need more Team Handball!). My favorite event to follow is the decathlon. I am always astounded at the sheer amount of athletic ability it takes to perform 10 very different events in a semi-short amount of time. You absolutely cannot be a specialist in just one or two events, you have to be amazing at all ten. To me...the winner of the decathlon is truly the greatest athlete in the world.
So, to celebrate the Olympics, and this event, I wanted to look at Decathlon, a 1984 Avalon Hill / Sports Illustrated board game. In Decathlon, 1 to 7 players play as a famous decathlete in history. Through dice rolling and chart-reading players can recreate their own fantasy decathlon.
At some level, I hesitate to call Decathlon a "game." It truly is more of a statistical simulation of the events. Players don't really have many choices throughout the game. They are at the mercy of the die rolls and the charts. There are certain points where some choices can be made, which helps the game be a bit less dry.
I said earlier that 1 to 7 people can play, but in fact, 8 can play with the AH / SI edition of the game, as they added a "Super Decathlete" which is an amalgamation of the best charts of each of the included real life athletes. In theory, this super character should be able to blow away all of the other character... in theory.
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| Drab, and not very useful, but it gets the job done |
In order to test this game, I set aside a fair amount of time (I turned on a Red Sox / Yankees game), and decided to see who the best decathlete of all time was. That's right, I played an 8-player game of Decathlon, by myself (I know how to live the high life). It's a very easy game to solo play (with as many or as few athletes as you wish)l. In the box, you get three dice, two boards (which are only truly necessary in one event), a set of rules, a booklet of athlete charts / biographies, and chits for each athlete.
So, who can you play in Decathlon? Such luminaries as Milt Campbell, Rafer Johnson, Vasily Kunetsov, Bob Mathias, Bill Toomey, Jim Thorpe, and C.K. Yang. Yeah, don't worry, even as a fan of the sport, I only knew of three of these guys before I sat down to play. To help introduce you to them, however, the designers did write up 2-3 paragraphs about each man's history. I greatly appreciated this history, and in some cases, the stories even play a part in the game.
The game works like this: each event has a slightly different set of rules, but they all follow a few basic principles. When it is your turn, you roll the three dice. The dice will be read in such a way as to come up with a two-digit number. The black die is always first, the two white dice are added together to make up the second digit. You then cross reference that two digit number in the athlete's chart for the current event. You will find a time, distance, or height depending on the event. You record that on the score sheet. Once the event is done, you take the athlete's result, and look at a points chart located in the rule book. You then get their score for the event, which is placed on the score sheet. So, with everything set up, let's take a look at the 10 events (and some highlights from my game).
100 Meter Dash - the first event is also the simplest. This event is simply roll the dice, and get a score. In my game, the times ranged from 10.4 seconds to 11.0. The 10.4 was run by Jim Thorpe, named the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th Century.
Long Jump - In the long jump, each athlete gets three chances to jump as far as they can. Before each roll, the player chooses one of three charts "Safe, Average, or All Out" this determines how hard the athlete will try on that jump. Safe means you'll get a below average score, but there's no chance of injury or fouling. Going up the charts increases both of those chances, but also brings you chances of having better scores. In the long jump, Bill Toomey had the first 1000 score of my decathlon. A 1000 score is considered to be an extremely good score. He jumped 26'6" on his first attempt to score 1035 points. The decathlon record is only 6 inches farther.
Shot Put - This even uses the exact same rules as the long jump. The results were extremely different, however. In Bill Toomey's biography, they talk about a childhood injury that meant he didn't have full strentgh in his hands as an adult. This showed up as a dismal 680 point performance in the shot put. Jim Thorpe took his second event with a 57'6" throw. This is actually 10 feet further than he ever threw in real life (I'll come back to this later). Oh yea, my super decathlete? Injured himself on his first throw, and had to play it safe the rest of the event.
High Jump - High Jump and Pole Vault are the most strategic events in the entire game. There's an amount of cat and mouse, bluffing, and even press your luck you'll have to play to win this event. In each athletes charts for these events, there are a series of heights. When you roll, you check to see if the height is greater than or equal to the height you are trying to jump. If it is, you pass, if not you fail. These two events are the only ones where fatigue play a factor. If you take too many jump attempts, you will end up too tired to perform your best in later events in the day. I think with more players, this event would be a lot of fun. In my game, unfortunately, the dice were unkind...with all decathletes bombing out at either 6'4" or 6'6"...except the super decathlete who injured himself attempting 6'7", knocking himself out of the competition altogether!
400 Meter Run - Take the 100 Meter Run, and multiply it by 4. That's this event. However, if you were fatigued from the high jump, you suffered a time penalty in this event. Bill Toomey proved that he has great endurance for running, by scoring 970 points with a blistering time of 46.6 seconds. Coincidentally, Bill Toomey currently holds the real life 400-m record at 45.68 seconds.
At the end of the first day, Rafer Johnson was actually leading, despite not winning a single event. His score was 4490. The low man was CK Yang at 4190.
100 Meter Hurdles - Another one roll and done event. Milt Campbell proved to be the best hurdler, coming in at 14.2 seconds, and 940 points.
Discus - This event works exactly like the Shot Put and Long Jump. Bob Mathias won the event at a good, but unremarkable 172'. Of all the events, this one probably showed how much Bill Toomey was set back by his childhood injury, only throwing 137'.
Pole Vault - Again, this event works the same way as High Jump, but the fatigue penalties can be more severe in the 1500 Meter Race. CK Yang ends up destroying the competition in his specialty event. He jumps 16' whereas only one other contestant even made it to the 15' height.
Javelin - ANOTHER three try event. This event proved to be quite an interesting one in my game. Vasily Kuznetsov actually won the event with a 238' throw. Jim Thorpe, who had taken over the lead after the hurdles, threw 194' and actually gave up the lead to Kuznetsov.
1500 Meter Run - Finally, the board comes into play. The 1500 Meter Run is a brutal way to end up two days of tough athletic competition. In the game, you have a track board, marked off in a number of spaces. On each player's turn, they roll the dice and check the chart like normal. This time, instead of finding a time, they will find a number (and sometimes a letter). This number tells them how many spaces they move along the track. The letter relates to their fatigue penalty in the pole vault. If the letter matches your fatigue level, you move one fewer space that turn. Off to the right of the track is a timer. After each player has moved, that timer is pushed forward 10 seconds. This roll and move aspect continues until each athlete completes roughly 3 3/4 laps of the board. In my game, Jim Thorpe absolutely obliterated everybody in the field. Scoring 1085 points in 3 minutes 32 seconds...or 30 seconds faster than the real world decathlon record is today.
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| Our champion |
Final results: Jim Thorpe proves himself to be the greatest athlete ever, scoring 8800 points. That score was not hit in real life decathlons until 1992.
If there is one major issue with the game, it is that Jim Thorpe is too powerful. They obviously bumped his numbers a bit to compensate for advances in the sport from the time he played. Unfortunately, I think they juiced him too much. He's a phenomenal runner with great endurance, he can throw everything but the javelin a country mile (remember the shot put result?), and he can jump over the moon (his score in the pole vault was 12'8" in my game, he never cleared over 11' in real life)...there's nothing he's really bad at. So, if you want to beat him in this game, you either have to injure him, or get lucky beyond luck's limits. Of course, in a simulation like this, you have to expect that everything isn't perfectly balanced. I just wish his card was a little more realistic.
That being said, I kind of enjoyed my time with Decathlon. I learned a great bit about some of the greatest athletes ever. I would love to see updated athletes like Bruce Jenner, Dan and Dave (you remember those guys right?) , and Daley Thompson. Perhaps someone on BoardGameGeek has done this already? I may have to find out.
