Prop Bet Tournament

[bigmonkey]

OK this is my first post. I'm not sure if this is a good place to put it though; the "other gambling" forum looked a bit empty anyway. So here is my idea for a 4-day fun event. This probably doesn't count much as gambling because the buy-ins would be relatively small.

Amongst my group of friends I get 9 people (inc. me) and on each of the first three days 3 players run a crazy race around the city completing stupid tasks. Each player gets trailed by a "reporter" who basically keeps a note of what stuff they do at what times (for future reference), and takes photos of the events to chronicle it. One person acts as the official on each day. They create a list of objectives the night before, start off with the players at the beginning of the race, revealing the objectives to the players only as they begin the race, then they waddle off to the finish-point and wait for the players to make it there. The players will probably leave 10 minutes after each other so as to get them distributed around the city, and what time they started will obviously be considered when calculating their eventual time. The winning player from each day goes through to the final on the last day in contention for the prizes. (probably split something like 50:30:20) Before the competition we would do preliminary draws tod etermine which days and against which players people are up against. What's important is that we also determine a ranking of running speeds of players so we can match up players with reporters of similar speed so that they don't lose them or so the reporter doesn't hold them back, since the races will involve a lot of running around the city with loads of people walking around.

Anyway, these are some of the challenges we've thought of so far. Actually these challenges were devised for a version of the race where the players are solo with no reporters so most of these objectives seem a bit lame in retrospect. We had to include only things where they could not cheat: i.e. they needed evidence at the finish-line of actually having done these things. With a reporter there's a lot of new things we can add. (I'm going to ask for some ideas [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img])

So far we've got: (btw just examples, whoever's officating the event would write them the night before, but they'd be like these.)

Easy- Find the time train xyz gets to station abc
Find a fact e.g. what is the exact date of birth of Charles Darwin? (strategy= library, bookshops, no phones allowed)
Take a mobile phone picture of some landmark e.g. the bull, Queen Victoria, or some harder landmark you need to do research to find.
Jump in the fountain (ends the race)
Graffiti statement X in place Y (and take photo for immediate evidence)
If phones have voice recorders on them, have recorded on them you shouting at top of your voice statement X eg. "I am a gay [censored] and eat dog [censored]!", you can do this wherever you like, or have to do it to the chimes of a bell
Get Argos catalogue page 375
Get x amount of signatures on the back of your neck (or somewhere equally hard to fake)

Medium-Buy something (with a receipt) that costs some weird number like the sum of two prime numbers greater or equal to 11 (in pence)
Get x amount of street leaflets or something- ethical campaigns etc.
Buy products xyz in a shop and get a refund immediately, with receipt
Buy something that requires research e.g. "Buy whatever Egypt's largest export is"
Get a personality test from the Scientology HQ
Get a pound coin with the shield logo on the tails side. (these are very rare: a trip to a bank might be +EV although they might be pissed)
Have your face painted
Get 5 high-street carrier bags

Difficult- Buy something that is rare to find but definitely exists somewhere in town (like a spice, weird food item eg. a fresh Cambodian king prawn)
Buy something embarrassing (not just anything- it's specified)
Get a photo/signature of a celebrity
Give blood
Acquire illegal drugs
Get arrested

Random (luck/ misc)- Get today's metro {and do the sudoku} [The metro is a free newspaper given out on buses and trains. This is a good challenge because by 2pm they're very hard to find, but they've been distributed in random places around the city and could be anywhere. Someone could easily spend hours looking for one whereas someone else might find one within 2 minutes]
Take a photo of another competitor without them knowing it. The photo is valid if the person photographed isn't pointing in the direction of the camera.
Take a picture of an enraged tramp (presumably just after you've enraged them)


Obviously with a reporter present there is a lot of room for better challenges than these. Maybe we could force the players to travel around the city on space hoppers or skateboards (none of us have ever skated)?

The end result of all this would be a load of funny pictures of people doing the same stupid thing, a "champion" and runner-ups. Plus if the reporters note the exact times the players do things we could present the races chronologically with different things happening around the city. All of this could be presented on a website. The reason we need 9 players is because you essentially need 4 non-players each day to do the reporting and officiating, so duties would be spread out. There's 25 places up for grabs [4 officials, 12 reporters, 9 players (inc 3 who make final)] so people will be filling on average nearly 3 roles in the running of the tournament.

So, any ideas? Also good would be some links to events of this nature being held before. I did a few google searches but I may not have been searching for the right things anyway. Thanks.