The Rules
Here’s the setup: each player will end up with eight countries, and we’ll hand those countries out through a draft. The country pool is organized using historical results from the last three Winter Olympics to keep things balanced, so everyone winds up with a similar mix—one “good” team, one “average” team, and six teams that either haven’t earned a medal in the last three Olympics or have never competed at all. Scoring is weighted by medal type: 5 points for every gold, 3 points for every silver, and 1 point for every bronze earned by any of your countries. Also, to keep the game from turning into “whoever drafts the usual powerhouses wins,” we’re excluding a few standout historical giants from being drafted this Olympics—Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway—and we’re also banning the USA, because the whole point is to cheer for the lesser-known or smaller countries and actually get invested in their surprise runs and big moments.
Individual Olympic Athletes