The Great Races, Sid Sackson 1978

The Great Races is one of the one-page games created by Sid Sackson, published in Games Magazine.  This one was in the Jan/Feb 1978 issue.  It's what we would now call a "roll and write" game, where you roll dice and make some kind of markings on paper or a score sheet.

It's not complicated.  The score sheet represents a series of horse races.  You take turns rolling four dice and splitting them into two combos of two dice for scoring.  You mark off boxes in the 2 through 12 rows as needed.  First one to complete a row gets the higher point score shown next to that row.  At that time, if another player is past the double line, they get the second place (smaller) bonus.  That's it.

It starts off as just roll and write, but once a race is finished, it's finished.  If race 4 is done, nobody gets to score a 4 anymore.  So toward the end there's some competition for the remaining numbers.  You can eyeball the scores along the way, and should generally know if you're winning or losing the overall match, but in the end, add up all those scores for a conclusive winner.

The score sheet I used came from the BoardGameGeek page, as the original was more cramped and the gray shading was hard to see pencil marks on. 

We can't really expect a game with one column of rules to have a lot of complexity or variations, but two options came to mind:

1) each player starts with two tokens, and use one token at a time as needed to completely block a player from scoring a combo. There were moments when that would have been a fun thing to drop on the other player, and feel some sense of control over the outcome.

2) you can choose to add up three dice to make a score and skip the other die.  This came up after rolling so many sevens.  You would get fewer boxes checked overall, but maybe you could sneak some extra tick marks late in the game.

By the way, you should Google Sid Sackson.  He was one of the eminent game designers of the 1970s to 1990s, and there are a lot of articles, tributes and interviews available out there.  I had his Book of Classic Board Games when I was in high school, and I'm sure that many more of his games will be making an appearance here.