I submit it may be fantasy curling. http://fantasy.curlingzone.com/
There is no fantasy sepak takraw. Fantasy WNBA is, I’m thinking, not particularly popular.
A friend suggested Fantasy Fantasy Football. You draft a team of people playing Fantasy Football.
In the oddest category, there are a number of variants of fantasy pro-wrestling.
I searched for Fantasy Jousting and got a few hits that look “real”:
http://download.white-wolf.com/download/download.php?file_id=420
http://pub10.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=847266105&frmid=58&msgid=1237596&cmd=show
My gaming group is just about to start another league of Blood Bowl, whose slogan is “The table top board game of fantasy football” (i.e. fantasy as in orks, humans, elves, etc.)
Someone in the league suggested we start up a fantasy football league for our Blood Bowl league. I then of course suggested that we start up a fantasy league made up of Fantasy Football league coaches of our (magical) Fantasy Football league.
But I guess even if we don’t do that it might qualify for this thread, if we actually spin up a Fantasy League for our Blood Bowl league.
Sounds like a really cool idea. Is it like the Monsters of the Midway pull-out game that showed up in Dragon magazine may years ago? Basically football played by fantasy monsters?
This all reminds me of my first Fantasy Football experience. You can imagine my disappointment when I showed up to the first draft only to discover that none of the draftees show up in any of my fantasies. I thought I was in the wrong room.
Thank you very much; I’ll be online all night. Try the roast beast.
Bill Simmons has mentioned numerous times that for Fantasy anything is a good time. On one of his podcasts he and two other guys picked teams for a fantasy league dedicated to a MTV reality show. (You get so many points if your guy hooks up with someone else, you get points for him getting in a fight, etc). How about Fantasy Movies, where you pick movies coming out in a time period and score based on box office, number of explosions, number of boobies, etc?
I’m in the US, but get CBC. Curling is a big deal up there, like bowling used to be in the 70s.
My wife and I are drawing up rules for fantasy Biggest Loser.
Fantasy poker
Fantasy bass fishing
(both are real)
We may need a corollary to Rule 34.
34(a) For any sport, there is fantasy for it.
I’ve got to vote Fantasy anything, including football/baseball/basketball/hockey/curling…
Let me see if I have this right:
It’s not exciting enough to listen to the game
It’s not exciting enough to just watch the game, even on the 62" screen, with your buddies, beer and food
It’s not exciting enough to go to the game
It’s not exciting enough to bet on the game
There has to be a Fantasy version of the game to keep you interested?
(Not pointing fingers here, I just don’t get fantasy teams.)
That second link is a post on a message board which seems to refer to an actual re-enactment of a joust, at a “faerie fest” (I am assuming that is some sort of fantasy version of a Renaissance fair.) The first one is an extremely detailed game, involving dice, which seems to have no relationship at all to actual historical jousting.
Think of a fantasy sport as a board game, but instead of rolling dice you use results from the sports page. Then consider that a player can improve their ‘dice rolls’ by following the real sport and players and predict the results. If you think of it this way, a non-sports fan should be able to see the attraction.
Considering most fantasy players are already watching the sport, it is basically a pair of hobbies that tie in nicely together. So it is not an issue that watching the sport isn’t fun enough. It is that you can have fun watching the sport and playing a fantasy game at the same time and both hobbies overlap.
FWIW, I am not much of a sports fan nor do I play fantasy sports, but I can see why it would be a lot of fun.
And just what is odd about curling? I find football pretty repulsive to be honest. All that mayhem. Curling is carried out by genuine amateurs. Since there is offense as well as defense it is much more interesting than bowling. That and baseball are the only sports I follow. I once saw the top curler of his era tell the opposing skip (captain) to put an accidentally kicked rock back wherever he thought it should go and then turned around and walked away. And this was one of the most competitive skip in Canada (and probably the world), but he trusted the other guy to do it honestly. (The rule says that the two skips should try to agree and call the referee only if they cannot.) You can go a while season and never see a referee called except to make a measure.
On the other hand, I think fantasy anything is pretty drippy.
In my opinion and I’m sure many other, curling beats bowling and golf hands down as far as “action” sport entertainment value goes. I would further rank it above baseball as far as being a sport I could enjoy watching on TV.
Any sport that someone is unfamiliar with is probably the “dumbest / oddest” to them. Perhaps that would be cricket for me, since I’ve never seen a game played. But the worldwide popularity make it seem like I’d be very wrong to try stating so.