Perhaps the most well known and most popular fantasy cycling game out there. Velogames is super easy to play and really addictive.
It operates on a simple formula of selecting a nine rider roster and then there’s nothing you can do once the race starts, except watch the points roll in or all your pre-race predictions come crashing down. For standard one week tours, there are no restrictions on riders. Just chose from the whole list using the 100 credit budget. The grand tours are the most played games and things here get a little more complex. There are four rider categories to chose from. You’re allowed two all rounders, two climbers, one sprinter, and three from an ‘unclassed’ category with one space left from any of them.
Some players (not me obviously…okay me as well) get really into their team selections, cooking up spreadsheets with foolproof formula guaranteed to find the winning line-up. In the end though, a successful team is a mixture of the best riders, and the luckiest guesses. But once you’ve tried one game, you’ll have to enter them all in an endless pursuit of perfection.
The owner also runs a Spring and Autumn classics competition. The original rules being a twelve rider roster with a tight transfer budget of 24 to use across all Spring races and slightly more for the Autumn races. He’s played around with the settings for the 2019 season to trial a nine rider game with unlimited transfers, so who knows which version he’ll put on next year.
The scoring system favours riders who consistently finish in the top 15 of stages with large bonuses for the top four finishers. The other scoring criteria to loot out for are the end of tour classification points with high placed riders in the general classification (GC) netting the largest points haul, but there are also tidy points up for grabs for the points jersey and king of the mountains jersey leaders. After this, the daily points can have a huge effect on an overall score. Spending a long time at the pointy end of the GC can be very lucrative, as are teammate assist points so that’s something else to think about.
And that’s pretty much it! The game runs a season long competition to determine the best fantasy cycling manager, and also a grand tour competition for those purists amongst you.
The Pelotonian 