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Man I made up so many of these types of games it is scary. I used to do the racing thing, but with pennies I would slide across the bar top. I used to simulate entire decades of a fictional baseball league using dice (by myself). I invented something remarkably similar to curling, which I had never heard of at the time, using a kitchen floor and little round parts of some toy or game, I don't even remember (and of course, an associated "league" emerged). I used to make a "league" out of a really stupid solitaire game I made up with a deck of cards that pitted all four suits against one another (I always rooted for clubs - still my favorite suit and this is totally arbitrary).
I also began programming computers (on an apple ][) solely for the purpose of making some of this silly little dice games and the like into something less cumbersome and more robust. My first project was a BASIC program that simulated NBA seasons and even featured random trades! The algorithm for that game was pretty stupid, but my friends and I had a blast watching the games unfold.
The algorithm was basically this: every player in the nba had a PPG avg. in a given game, their production was calculated as being 75-125% of their current PPG value. A team's score is then just a total of each player's production. After each 10 games, PPG values were recalculated based on the last 10 games performance. And trades would happen from time to time. I had like a 1 in something chance of a trade happening after a given game. Then two players from different teams were randomly(!) chosen to be traded. Made for some jaw-droppers of course. It was far from perfect, but as a first big programming project I was proud of it, and my friends LOVED it.
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