Amazing Race Challenge Design

Just like Survivor, The Amazing Race would be a terribly boring show if there were no challenges every episode.  Each episode would just be watching people take taxis/tuktuks/airplanes/boats/cars places and yell at each other and their drivers.  As it is now, that's only about half the show.  The other half of the show is where the meaningful choices and skill come into play: the challenges.

Every episode has at least two challenges: one Roadblock (one of the two team members must perform a task alone, the team member is chosen before the task is known) and one Detour (teams may choose to do one of two different tasks).  Sometimes there are other tasks as well: either puzzles (the clue is a picture and they must figure out what it is and go there) or just random tasks teams must perform to earn a clue.  Generally the tasks are related to their current location and are something the locals do regularly or something to help the local community (I feel REALLY bad for the people in India who got their TV antennas put up by people on the race since they clearly weren't concerned about doing a good job, just doing it quickly).

The meaningful choices come into play with the Detours since they get to choose the task.  Generally, one task is a physical task that requires a lot of strength and energy, but will be finished quicker or in a known time frame.  The other task will either involve a lot of luck (find the teacup with the red dot on the bottom out of these 1000 tea cups), mental skill (build a motorcycle from these parts using this example motorcycle as a guide), charisma (sell 20 of these local items as fast as you can), or take a long time (take a Turkish bath).  So the players have to know their strengths and weaknesses and weigh them with the time spent on the task.  If it's going to take them 3 hours to do the physical task and anywhere from 1 minute to 4 hours for the luck task, they should probably try their luck.  If they are a physically strong team, they just always pick the physical tasks and just shoot through them quickly.

Any competitive skill based games should have some method of balancing between players of differing skill levels.  Smash Brothers has items to give players with less fighting skills a chance at winning.  Cranium has a whole array of game types so if you're not good at Charades, you can do a word challenge or a Pictionary challenge.  Letting players choose the challenge with some other balancing mechanism (other players throwing roadblocks at you, each consecutive time you do the same type of challenge you go up in difficulty, etc.) lets players show off what they're good at as well as keeping the game fair for everyone.