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So You Want To Design an Amazing Race Leg? | A comprehensive guide

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Pi:
Part 4: Workflow
Tying It All Together

You have a good inspiration or two, and can start to see a leg coming together. What’s next? There can still be several steps before a design is completed. I’ll go through the structure of the approach I usually take. I use word documents, though all or part of this could be done with a piece of paper or “journal page if that’s what you prefer to use. :)

If I’ve identified anything that I know for sure I want to include in the final design, I keep it at the top of the document, and then dive into additional sources as needed to look for leg-worthy material. It’s not strictly necessary to categorize your inspirations at this point, but I usually put things into lists: Task ideas, Location ideas, Fun Facts, and Photos/Videos. “Fun facts” can refer to the type of things Phil would narrate when introducing a new country, location, or task - for example, ”Athens is one of the world’s oldest cities, founded over 3,000 years ago”. These facts help to supplement your design choices; it can be easier to remember why and explain why you wanted to do a vanilla-related task in Madagascar if you’ve written down that “about 80% of the world's vanilla supply is produced in Madagascar, making it one of the country’s most important exports”.

Task ideas can come from finding interesting locations, or vice versa. If some tradition is particular to a certain city or region, be sure to keep that in mind. If you’ve identified a festival that you want to make the basis of part of a leg, you can search for what place the festival is held, and use that as a location. For the potential tasks you’ve picked out, think: Is it most appropriate for this task to be done in a stadium/market/mosque/whatever, or can I get creative?

When looking for inspirations, I encourage you to list all possible ideas. Just throw things out there for now; you can always pare it down later. I used to have a habit of stopping immediately upon finding just enough material to complete a leg (not necessarily a great leg, but a leg), but that’s certainly not the most thorough way to design. It’s okay to overshoot your initial expectations- in some cases, I’ve found that I can actually create two good legs in a location when I was initially hoping for just one.

I’ll take an aside here to mention that some places are simply going to be much more difficult to research and design in than others. There’s just not as much information out there about rural Burkina Faso or small Micronesian islands as there is about major cities and tourist regions. It should be expected that the process will be more slow-moving and sparse when designing in these areas; you might find only just enough. That being said, there’s never been a better time than the present for researching less well-known places, due to the growth of technology and democratization of information. You’d be surprised sometimes!

Once you’ve listed out a lot of ideas, you can start ranking your ideas and associating them with race elements. What items could work as a Detour side, Roadblock, Fast Forward? What is suited only for a minor task? Does anything need to come before or after another item for the leg in sequence? Are there collections of similar tasks that could be put together for the leg to flow smoothly?

I also like to check things out on a map. Where are the locations in relation to one another? I prefer to avoid unnecessary backtracking or illogical paths during a leg. Rome2Rio or your favorite map software can help you to get an idea of how teams would move from location to location throughout the leg.

It’s usually about this time in the design process that I pay a visit to the Reality Fan Wiki, a fan-created webpage for everything Amazing Race. Not only is there a page for every televised Amazing Race season (including international versions), there is a page for each leg with information about all locations visited and tasks done. There are also pages for every team and every country that has been visited. This wiki is an excellent resource! I use it to see whether the area I’m interested in designing has been visited before, and to check whether an idea I’ve found has been already done by an Amazing Race. (As I alluded to earlier in the guide, it is very difficult to be totally original after hundreds of legs and thousands of tasks have been designed by Race producers. If you find that an idea has been done before, you don’t have to feel discouraged; think of it as “good minds think alike”. :) )

At this point, the design begins to take shape. I usually start drafting a “Wikipedia-style” bullet point summary of the leg(s). Each location is listed in order, along with any planes, trains, buses, ferries, etc. The synopsis of each task is also written below. If you’re a more visual person, you could also represent your design with a map. There are many websites/apps that allow you to place a pin on each location, and then you could draw lines between locations or experiment with animations.

Keep in mind that this can be a very iterative process! So many things can change, even at this stage. I’ve split one leg into two, completely changed what city I’m designing in within the country, and more.

I’ve also given up at this point. A couple years ago, I started out trying to make a leg in the Isle of Skye. It’s such a cool place to read about, so I should be able to come up with a leg, right? However, I just couldn’t find good material for a design. (I’m sure it’s out there, I just was not finding it). I came to a point where I had to be honest with myself that it wasn’t happening despite my best wishes and that I shouldn’t try to force it.

So, you may not be successful, despite your best effort. If that’s the case, don’t delete your work! What if you come across some items later on that would make for good material? Your future self would thank you for not deleting your initial progress. And even if you are able to pare down a long list of ideas and finish a leg design, keep what didn’t make it into the leg in your notes. You never know when you could use a backup task or substitution, or when you could come across more inspirations that could be added to previous unused material to result in an expanded design(s).

That recaps the procedure I use to go from loose ideas to a concrete design. If you’re able to design in a more streamlined way, by all means, cut out any unneeded steps. The goal should be to create something you like, using whatever process works best for you. :tup:

Pi:
Part 5: Conclusion

It’s been good for me to type this all out! I’ve learned a lot over the years, and collecting and applying these principles has personally resulted in a big improvement in quality. Quality has become far more important than quantity to me over time, and I have been able to substantially improve satisfaction with the designs I create.

The Amazing Race is one of the best television shows for fans to create their own custom “fantasy” materials. I have been highly influenced by the folks here at RFF and our Fantasy Game section, and I can say that RFF has been the best place for discussion of all types of Amazing Race content, real-life and fan-made. These tips given in this guide were written with the aim of designing “fanfic” legs, however. Fantasy game designers don’t operate the same way that World Race Productions does. In a fantasy game, you don’t have to explicitly consider camera angles, potential TV ratings, seasonality at filming time, security, minimizing costs, what the network executives think, etc. It is okay to create your designs without using all the constraints of the real show.

If you’ve created some designs and aren’t sure what to do with them, consider sharing with a friend who is also into the Amazing Race, or feel free to join the conversation here at RFF. While the number of projects launched in the Fantasy Game Board (reminder: only available to those with an account that has made at least five posts) isn’t as high as it once was, there are still a lot of passionate Race fans that are involved. RFF members have launched voting games (where users make posts to help their favorite teams) and traditional games (where members sign up, create a team, and complete challenges given by the host). Others have also showcased their custom races in this section, with no game elements attached.

Designing Race legs can be tough sometimes. What if you’re just starting out and it all feels like a steep climb? First, we all began somewhere, and most people who stick with it improve a lot over time. Second, it might simply take a while to finish a design- it often does for me. Third, it doesn’t hurt to just go for it and not overthink it too much; it’s not the end of the world if you don’t finish with something perfect. If things still feel overwhelming, you can not worry about the specifics of each leg and instead just try designing a route. Users have posted their routes in this thread.

You can always post on RFF and bounce things off of us. There is a good chance that one of our members will write a constructive reply. Not to speak too much on behalf of others, but I think a lot of us would be happy to give feedback and advice on ideas you have as well as answer any questions.

I’m sure that I missed something over the course of the guide. Throw your comments at me! I also hope that these posts inspire conversation about Amazing Race design. It can be a fun and rewarding activity, and it’s always better to have correspondents with whom you can discuss and share the fruits of your labor. So thanks, RFF, for all the inspiration and community! And thank you, reader, for making it this far. :)
The world is waiting! :conf:

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