If you have an idea for a “challenge” for the Color War, feel free to post below. 
Challenges should be team/socially-oriented, and fairly simple to do (i.e. no 10-page essays, need for brilliant computer graphic skillz, etc.)
Thanks!
This isn’t a new idea but I really liked the trivia we did a few years back. It was great that it was FF themed and RL racing themed but if its too time consuming to come up with questions you could do just general trivia. It was fun either way. Maybe this time instead of going member by member which took a long time each team gets their own “set” to answer together and maybe most/all of the team has to vote on the correct answer. The first team to submit the correct answers to their set-wins the challenge.
Another idea would be to have teams create their own trivia for other teams to answer. They’d want to make it as difficult but not impossible to answer(maybe Shanthi would have to review the answers to make sure they’re reasonable first). The team that recieves the other teams trivia questions only has a certain amount of time to answer them and also have to have most/all member participate. If some questions end up being able to stump the team they were given too the team that created them gets points. The questions that were correctly answered =pts for the team that answered them.
Just some ideas…
What about team handicapping? If nothing else, for the “big” races like the Triple Crown & the Breeders’ Cup. I don’t know how easy this would be to code in an automated fashion… The only problem I see with trivia is if it’s based on known facts - thanks to google, I feel pretty confident in my ability to answer trivia. :P So we’d have to be careful about what KIND of trivia we pick.
You could also have a running pedigree submission challenge (or a time limited one where the team who submits the most pedigrees in 2 weeks wins would work, too). Again, this one would require some sort of monitoring system so teams don’t just put in auction books worth of pedigrees.
Perhaps you could make other teams “monitor” the pedigree submissions… so each team has 2 weeks to submit as many pedigrees as possible. Afterwards each team gets 2 other teams’ lists (so each list gets checked twice). The teams would then use the internet/whatever resources they have to check to make sure that no more than say 1 or 2 of the names in a pedigree are real. If both teams flag a pedigree as real/bad then the other team doesn’t get credit for that name. So say Team A submits 100 pedigrees and Team B submits 80 pedigrees. Team A has 25 of theirs get flagged by both review teams as using real horse names so they get credit for 75 pedigrees. None of Team B’s pedigrees get flagged by both teams, so they get 80 points. You could then spot check 5 or 10 of the flagged and unflagged pedigrees. Since teams can help their standing by catching real pedigrees used by the other teams, they should have motivation to check out the other pedigrees. Alternatively you could give a certain number to each CW member from other teams’ lists and then require 2/3 people who got that name to have flagged it or something.
It would be fun to be able to challenge another team’s horse in a match race… I don’t know how difficult that would be coding wise…
It would also be fun to have the horses switched up between the teams sometime throughout the year.
I think the “match race” idea is pretty cool.
All the teams get the “same” horses age and sex wise. There could be a couple of Stakes races where only CW horses can enter. Keep them by sex, age and maybe make the distances generic. Like 7f or 1 mile 1/8th. One on turf and one on dirt.
Trivia can be fun but hard when it is a team and everyone is on at different times. You could say do 10 questions to each team, once a month and have it strictly for RL racing.
I do trivia on another game and have come up with some pretty tuff questions. There are several people on here who can attest to that.
I would be happy to come up with questions for other teams. I find it fun and stimulating and you can learn alot from it.
Doing pedigrees would be hard because there are so many registered TB’s that it is getting harder to come up with names. I know as I am still trying to name my yrling filly.
I like the idea of doing trivia/quizzes, though I admit I don’t want to have to think of questions. 
The ‘secrets’ game we did the other year was fun…I’m sure we couldn’t do it every year, but maybe every other year would be cool.
As far as match races go – I do think that it’s a fun concept, but that’s pretty much what CW horses already do…you get more points for beating other CW horses, at least.
I’ve seen CW teams’ horses get swapped around before, and that always looked like it would be an interesting challenge, especially with training and such.
Handicapping could be cool…it might be too unwieldy to insist that every team member vote on picks for every race, but maybe if each member would post their picks, just like they do now, just in a section of their CW team’s thread…the team with the most winnings from that would get points. Each player could be assigned certain races: Player 1 does races 1-5, Player 2 does races 6-10, etc. (And hey, maybe the team members could all divvy that money up amongst them at the end of the year.)
I like the pedigree idea a lot…we could require that teams provide a link to the page that proves a pedigree was just a copy of an existing one to provide ‘proof’, and such. I don’t think that duplicating RL names is as much of a problem as just wholesale copying of pedigrees from, say, pedigreequery.com or something. I would think that as long as a pedigree wasn’t relying on famous real horses (like, say, inserting A.P. Indy or Cigar into it), and if it wasn’t just a straight copy from another source, that it would be okay. (Right? )
I like the idea of “swapping” horses say midway into the yr as long as they weren’t injured.
What was the “secrets” game that has been mentioned?
Handicapping would work if it was divided amongst the team members. You know every week for the month of January, you pick races 1-10 and then in Feb, 11-20 and rotate each month so this way no one is always having to pick the stakes races. The yr end totals get split evenly amongst that team’s members. The winning team for the yr, gets an extra 20 or 30% of their total winnings added, to be split up.
Captain posts each month their team totals so we all know where each other team stands.
You should my mom do some questions for trivia. She can be brutal >:D on her questions.
Each player sent one secret about themselves to Shanthi…a quirk, an accomplishment, something about them. Then she posted each secret, one at a time. She had also drawn up a list of all the players in random order; she would go down the list and assign a player to guess who the secret belonged to. The player then had a limited amount of time…like 12 to 24 hours…to guess. You got points if you guessed right, but if you didn’t guess at all, your team lost points. I don’t think people were penalized for guessing wrong. It took a long time and it might be more work than it’s worth for Shanthi, but I thought it was fun, at least. 
I like the idea of rotating the races to be handicapped. 
I’ve been thinking about automating the secrets game, since I agree that it was pretty fun. In theory, it wouldn’t be too hard to do.
The pedigree challenge could be fun, too.
And, in theory, when I automate betting I could setup a special “fake betting” thing for CW teams (since they shouldn’t earn $ doing it ).
Keep the ideas coming.
Trivia questions are always fun like we did the one year and would vary the posting times was always good and had good participation. I like the idea of the match races as well for just Color War horses for possible bonus racing points as well.
Another idea is why not a random photo located somewhere on the site each week possibly that the team has to find in order to score extra points. This way we have to explore all of the pages within the site, and a scavenger hunt is always fun
Cannot think of anything else at the moment, but I will post if I do!
Lindsay
Scavenger hunt sounds fun.
Also, I like the idea of having trivia be a team event, so every team gets a set of 10 questions to answer. Captains can post polls on the message board (or you could automate it) so that each member votes for the right answer, and answers cannot be submitted for the team by the captain till you get like 75% participation, and if you get higher participation than that you get a bonus. So then captains can decide if the last 2 people will never respond or if it’s worth hoping they respond in the next 24 hours or whatever.
I really liked the secrets game, though I didn’t participate. I remember watching it once, and it looked really fun. I was hoping you would do that again! And automation would be amazing, if you could do it! 
I like the idea of trivia, though I would know nothing without using Google… but, then it would be a great learning experience. Scavenger hunt also sounds fun.
So… for my idea…
To expand on trivia, I have these “problems of the day” in math class. So, we could have some brain-teaser type things in the questions along with some RL racing questions? Or make them two separate things?
I’m really excited for my first year of CW.
I have no idea if this is doable, but I thought I would toss it out there…
I noticed that there are quite a few unnamed FF yearlings out there, still. 369, to be exact. Something tells me that they won’t all get named by January 1st. Since there are so many of us that love to name foals…perhaps we could have a foal-naming challenge for the teams, next year.
Each team would get assigned, say, half a dozen horses. The teams would then have a week to name all six horses. At the end of the week, the team captains could either PM Shanthi with the names, or post in a thread (viewable only to team captains), and then Shanthi could go back with her goddess powers to name the unnamed horses.
Then, at the beginning of each week, the teams that had successfully named their horses would get six more to name.
If all six horses were not named by the end of the week, the team would not be able to turn in their names until all six had been named. However, there would not be a bonus for turning in names early, just to try to ensure that the team members give some thought to the names.
The horses could be kept track of by their database numbers, during the naming process.
The team would win a point value of, say, 50 points for each batch that was successfully turned-in.
If each team was super on-the-ball, then all the horses would have names after about 8 weeks…in plenty of time before the 2 yo racing season would start.
Does that make sense? And, more importantly, would that save Shanthi any work?
(It would be cool if a script could just auto-assign batches to teams, where Shanthi would just have to push a button and send a team a new batch when an old one got turned in…but I have no idea if that would be hard or easy to write.)
Anyways…it just occurred to me, so I figured I’d put it out there for others to look at.
I really like Nan’s suggestion and am in favor of it. It would be cool if team members could submit names and then the team votes. Majority wins much like our race suggestions. Also, maybe bonus points could be awarded if EACH member votes AND suggests names for a horse each batch, that way 1 person doesn’t do all the naming/suggestions. This would encourage participation and activity. I like the idea of having a time limit. Once the deadline passes, maybe those unnamed horses go to a team that has gotten all of theirs in, to be named, and the teams that don’t complete the task, either forfeit a batch to name, or have points deducted.
Great idea Nan, I think it be an excellent activity!