Amazing Race Game Design

In watching any competition, the most exciting thing is if it's a close match.  In television, more excitement gets more ratings.  So there are two ways to ensure a close match.  You can either script the competition and fake it (just make sure your audience never figures this out or that you're entertaining enough that it doesn't matter) or you design your competition with plenty of methods for players to make a comeback (making sure not to have any rubberbanding).  Over the years of watching The Amazing Race (my personal favorite reality TV show), I've noticed some very subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways that The Amazing Race keeps it a close race.

In case you're not familiar with the show, each episode is one leg of a race around the world.  On each leg, teams follow a series of clues to the pit stop at the end of each leg, sometimes having to compete in challenges along the way.  Usually, the last team to reach the pit stop will be eliminated from the race.  Once there are three teams left, they race to the finish line somewhere back in the United States.

Rather than making the obvious of choice of having every team start each leg at the same time, teams start the next leg of a race 12 hours after they completed the last leg.  So if one team is far ahead or far behind, they keep that same time buffer from the other teams (for better or worse).  Fortunately, the limited number of ways to fly from one country to the next help to shrink this buffer.  There are just enough options for sneaky teams to try their luck on a different route from the rest of the pack, but generally on the legs where they switch countries (which is usually every other leg), most, if not all, of the teams will be forced to take the same flight, thus evening out the playing field some.  For the legs where they don't fly to different countries, they frequently will be starting the leg in the middle of the night, so the first destination will be somewhere that doesn't open until morning.

The takeaway for this is to use natural limitations to your advantage when designing your game.  In Settlers of America, players can't drop off their supplies unless other players have built settlements, so no one can win unless everyone is doing well.  In Settlers of Catan, players only have a limited number of city tokens, so they can't get too far ahead of other players solely through cities.  In video games, this is much harder because the only real natural limitations are a player's hardware specs and you really don't want to base your games limitations on that or your game will truly be a pay to win game.  So you can make virtual limitations that seem natural.  In most RTS games, you have a population limit so you can only build so many units and the more powerful units take up more population, thus limiting the total number of powerful units you can have.