In Jack Vance’s book Trullion he has a game called Hussade, which is very difficult to describe, but the goal is to be able to denude a young virginal woman before the entire hussade stadium.
Arthur C. Clarke had space yacht races with giant sails to catch the solar winds in his short story “Sunjammer”: oddly, it hasn’t caught on yet.
And then there’s Brockian Ultra-Cricket.
In one of Keith Laumer’s Retief stories, a game played by robots is mentioned called “Ballistic Golf”. It’s played by robots because humans can’t hit a hole-in-one from a mile or two away . . .
The Machiavelli Interface by Steve Perry describes Poisonball, a sport played with a ball coated and filled with, yes, poison. It’s not fatal, but causes severe pain upon skin contact for several days, and the pain can’t be blocked by drugs. It’s played by two players separated by an “airwall”, each naked and carrying only a racket. If it strikes human tissue, it releases the poison upon the flesh struck, disabling the player; it also has a fifteen minute timer, and sometime randomly within that period it will spray everything on one side of the airwall with the poison. So there’s an incentive to try to keep the ball on the other guy’s side.
He also showed “The Maze Game” in The Man Who Never Missed, a sort of gladiatorial contest set in a maze of holograms and junk where they have to hunt down and defeat each other; last man standing wins. Weapons are not allowed, and medical robots stand by to take care of the defeated, but people occasionally die.
In Roger Zelazny’s The Game of Blood and Dust, two entities hover above the Earth, playing the game of the title. The reach into Earth’s past, each move in the game being the alteration of a specific bit of history. The goal of Dust is to produce a dead planet in the present time, destroyed by nuclear war; the goal of Blood is to produce a living one. The end of the story has one say “Best two out of three ? This time I’ll be Blood, and you be Dust.”
One Star Trek novel featured a version of chess not mentioned in Elendil’s Heir’s link above; four dimensional chess. Besides the standard Star Trek three dimensional design, it was also possible ( via a small built in transporter ) to cause your pieces to vanish and reappear a specified number of moves ahead. This allowed for tricks like the mutual destruction of pieces as a “timed out” piece appeared in an occupied square.
Karl Hanson’s War Games has the Dreamgame, where people’s minds are transferred into a “Synthebrain”, where they can impose their imaginations upon an illusionary world. Each trying to defeat the other in the virtual world, with tactics limited only by their imagination and strength of will.
How about Niven and Barnes’ *Dream Park *and the massive Live Action Role-Playing games created using holograms and virtual reality technolgy?
Also the sport of low gravity flying in the caverns of the moon in Heinlein’s The Menace from Earth.
Many years ago I read a collection of SF sports stories that included an extension of luge racing, in which a dozen or so racers run simultaneously, like sports-car racing. The sleds were fully enclosed, with pop-up panels as air brakes, and a limited number of solid-fuel rockets in the nose for times when you really needed to slow down. That sounds feasible, and I’d love to see it!
ETA: I have no idea of the author or the name of the collection. I might have been twelve when I read it.
He also had **Meteor ball ** in the story “Admiral’s Inspection.” The game is played by the participants flying around in space trying to push a ball through two slowly separating goals that had been fired out of a “sports-howitzer.” I always pictured it like a cross between soccer, basketball, and rugby, but in space.
I’ve always been fond of Jugger from The Blood of Heroes (also called The Salute of the Jugger). While searching wikipedia for a link, I was surprised to find out that people now actually play this game, in actual leagues and stuff. Huh.
The film version of Starship Troopers featured a sort of indoor and more gymnastic version of American football (never mentioned in the book).
Klin-zha, Klingon Chess.
That just took the already extant Arena Football, and packaged it as the future of the sport.
I’m shocked we’re this far in, and nobody’s brought up any of the games that form major parts of the story of Ender’s Game:
The Zero-G Grappling Hook Wargame (“The enemy’s gate is down!”)
The psychological (Giant’s Riddle) Game
The spacefight simulation game.
The last, of course, being quite real, and not a game at all.
Can’t remember the name or author, but in a book I read once, they play a game of life. The board is a square grid of life cells, which are mechanical, with little arms to detect their neighbors’ states. Each player (or side, there’s one game with two-player teams) sets up the first four (I think) rows of the board however they like, without seeing each other’s setups. Then they set the whole thing off and see which side wins. I don’t really remember what constitutes winning, but I’d guess something like number of black squares or something. Wish I remembered more.
Not precisely SF, but Robert Aspirin had Dragon Poker in his MYTH books. Similar to poker, but with the addition of conditional rules, whereby what direction you’re facing, the day of the week, and pretty much anything else amusing can affect who wins.
That was in Glory Season by David Brin.
Steel Beach by John Varley has a sport called “Slash Boxing” in which combatants go at it with knives and cyber-enhanced reflexes. The fight ends with a ritual decapitation. But thanks to the extremely advanced medical technology in Varley’s “Eight Worlds” series, beheading isn’t fatal unless the participant was voluntarily risking death.
“Park Your Car on Baychester Road Tonight” by Bill Bickel is about a game played by time travellers, in which each player attempts to cause a specific event in history to happen or not happen. The actual wagered events are relatively innocuous on a global scale, like influencing the location within a city that the capitol will be built. The time travellers make their moves with subtle butterfly-effect manipulation; the title refers to one of the players bribing a local to park their car in a different place.
*** Ponder
Not sure I think this is really what it’s like, but here’s a youtube clip of a simulation of Hussade… It’s meant to be a really fast game with two teams both trying to fight their way to the other end using padded two-headed clubs, all while running along, and jumping between, catwalks laid out above a large swimming pool.