How to run a backyard olympics

Five events, and each one should be won by a different kind of player. The categories worth covering:

• Accuracy at distance. Cornhole. The ACL court is 27 feet board-front to board-front and cancellation scoring keeps a round short.
• Accuracy up close. Ladder toss at a published 15 feet, with 3 / 2 / 1 scoring by rung so a near-miss still scores.
• Arithmetic under pressure. Molkky. Reach exactly 50; go over and drop to 25. It is the one event where being ahead is a disadvantage, and it is the great leveller.
• Pure chance. Giant yard dice. Somebody has to be able to win an event without being good at anything, or the same three people take the whole afternoon.
• A team event. Kubb, at a published 2 to 12 players. It is the only game here that absorbs a crowd into one game, and it gives the people who lost the individual events something to win together.

The single biggest structural decision. Five events played one after another take five times as long as five played simultaneously, and the difference is whether the afternoon finishes.

Set up all five stations at once and rotate groups between them. That needs space, and it needs the footprints to be compatible — which is a real constraint, because most of these games are corridors that want the same axis of the yard.

Kubb is the odd one out on time, which is why it works best as the final event with everybody in it rather than as one station in a rotation. The footprint arithmetic — which games can share a yard and which want the same run — is in how many yard games you need for a party.

Run it in teams of three or four rather than as individuals. Three reasons, all practical:

• Nobody is exposed. A person who is bad at all five events has a bad afternoon as an individual and a fine one on a team — which is the entire argument of yard games for a company picnic.
• The maths gets simpler. Four teams and five events is twenty results to record. Sixteen individuals and five events is eighty.
• It solves odd numbers. Most of these games publish 2 or 4 players, and a team structure absorbs a fifth or seventh person without anyone sitting out — the problem described in yard games for three players.

Four sentences, in front of everyone, and they cover the whole afternoon:

1. The events, and the order. Or the rotation, if they run in parallel.
2. The scoring ladder. Same points in every event.
3. Which rulebook per event, and anything you have shortened. “ACL rules, playing to 15” is a complete sentence.
4. When it finishes. A time, not a feeling.

The general version of this discipline is in yard game etiquette and house rules, and the single-game bracket alternative is in how to run a backyard tournament. For a school version with fixed rotations, school field days.