Part 1: IntroductionHave you ever got the inkling to design your own Amazing Race leg? Between the eight RFF
Design Challenges, the
Wishlist thread in the Discussion section, and the Fantasy Game Board (a section only available to those with an account that has made at least five posts), RFF has been a place for fans of the show to do just that. I’ve been a TAR fan for over a dozen years and have been experimenting with designing my own fantasy routes and legs for nearly as long. During that time, I’ve kept track of lots of the tips and tricks. I decided to curate this guide to give you a perspective of how a leg is designed, from beginning to end.
Hopefully, this guide will help or inspire you. If it does, I’d love to hear about it
Go ahead and post if you have something to add to the guide - I’m sure I haven’t thought of everything! I always enjoy talking about leg design and I hope this thread can spark some good conversations. (Psst - if you’re not on RFF yet, it’s easy to sign up and join in the discussion.
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Designing legs for fun as a fan of the show is quite different from the way that World Race Productions designs their legs. I don’t have any inside knowledge of how they operate - it’s probably quite different from how I do! Since this is just one fan’s perspective, your mileage
can and will vary. That’s okay, and to be expected! We all have different tastes, opinions, and objectives. This is my way of going about it. With that said, let’s jump in.
First of all,
why do we create our own Amazing Race legs? There are a few good reasons.
- For fun, pure and simple.
- To engage with the show. Especially when it’s the offseason, designing legs and playing games furnishes a supply of Race content.
- To investigate what our own travel to a particular place could look like. If there’s a place on my bucket list that I am not going to travel to anytime soon, I can live vicariously through the planning process in the meantime.
- Conversely, after traveling to a place, we can apply and share the things we experienced in that place via a design.
- Perhaps the foremost reason is to just learn more about the world. I have always been extremely curious about geography and culture across the globe. Watching the Amazing Race and designing my own legs has been a major outlet for that.
What should be the
goal of creating a leg? This will vary from person to person, and that’s okay- there’s no right or wrong way to design. I have found that my goal is to design a leg at the intersection of
original, interesting, culturally relevant, and realistic. I don’t hold myself strictly to these criteria, especially as they are somewhat subjective, but I find that most good designs hit these marks. Now, it can be difficult to be completely novel when hundreds of legs have already been created by the various franchises and by designers. It’s okay to design in a place that isn’t currently going to be visited soon due to geopolitical or safety reasons, and if a design is just for fun, then it doesn’t have to be realistic.
Another goal could be to aim for a leg that a person from the part of the world in which you designed would approve of. If a local could see your design and think “That’s how I’d like to see this place showcased on the Amazing Race”, it is probably a successful design. Again, there’s no right or wrong way to go about it! Your goals may be different. The most important thing is
to create something that YOU are happy with.
There’s basically no limit to the potential places to go and things to do- the world is your oyster. To narrow it down, a design generally starts with an
inspiration, which can be an entire country, a specific location, or anything you see that makes you think “this would be a great task for TAR”. Inspirations can come from a photo, video, literature, blogs, recipes, the spoken word, or really just about anything.
If you’re reading this, you probably hold a good deal of curiosity about the world, and inspirations may come to you quite frequently. In fact, an inspiration may have popped into your mind since you began reading this post! However, just one inspiration does not fill out an entire leg. Once you have an inspiration for a leg, you will likely need to fill in other details to start building up the design. In the next post, I’ll detail the
sources that I use for material. Expect that post to come tomorrow.
