ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Arroyo Seco couple bring mountain biking to a board game with ‘SEND IT!’
Hop on your mountain bike and take to the trails without leaving your home. The new board game “SEND IT!,” created by local professional mountain bike racers Macky Franklin and his wife, Syd Schulz, allows participants to showcase their riding skills as they play the game.
“In mountain biking when you’re hitting a jump or you’re hitting a drop they refer to the jump or the drop as a feature and that’s sort of an all encompassing term that includes rock garden and it’s kind of anything that is noticeable or noteworthy that someone might try to ride down or off,” Franklin explained.
“There’s this big thing of wanting to hit harder features or bigger features and there’s a tendency for people to do those before they’re ready to do them and end up hurting themselves. And so the idea with the game was to think about ways that you can prepare for a feature more effectively so when you do attempt it you don’t end up hurting yourself. You don’t crash. You are able to ride it successfully so that is the whole idea of the game.”
Players race from the trailhead to the golden burrito. Anyone who checks their phone while playing the game must draw a flash card.
“… We want to encourage people to be present and be hanging out with their friends and really focus on what they’re doing instead of constantly checking on their phones,” Franklin said. “We want to
encourage that interaction and community building basically.”
The idea for the game came to fruition after Franklin was injured after crashing his mountain bike — while jumping off a porch.
“It sounds stupider than it actually was,” he continued. “We were at a friend’s house and he’s a trail builder and he had actually designed a porch to be jumped off of so I wasn’t just being an idiot. It was actually made to be jumped off of and I was jumping off of it on my bike and I’m not totally sure what happened but something went wrong and I ended up basically diving out of a second story window head first. That was not great.”
Franklin suffered a separated shoulder, a cut chin and a concussion. He was unable to ride for a period of time and took to playing board games to keep himself entertained.
But he had never come across a mountain biking board game.
That was the seed that began to grow in his head.
“So after a while my poor concussed brain was like ‘OK, I can make a mountain biking game since I can’t ride my bike anyway.’ So that started the idea and then Syd, my wife, and I, we’d brew ideas back and forth and started mocking it up with cardboard and then paper and forcing our friends to play it with us and getting feedback and changing things and eventually arrived at a point where we felt it was fun enough that it could be a real game as opposed to having a fun project.”
The couple hired an illustrator and created artwork for the board game. “SEND IT!” launched in early May. People can receive the game by donating to the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.
To get the game, a donation of $59 or more can be made at senditboardgames.com. Delivery is expected in December.
Currently the game pieces feature two dimensional tokens with an illustration of the rider on both sides. The goal is to create 3D models of the six riders.
“At $40,000 we’re adding a card to the game and the backers get to choose what that cards going to be,” Franklin said of the Kickstarter campaign. “People have been having fun voting on it and giving ideas and stuff. So we’re optimistic that we’ll hit that goal in a couple of days and the next goal is the $70,000 for the 3D miniatures.”
Franklin is considering adding a stretch goal in between those two — probably at $55,000 raised — that would give people access to the game online so they’d be able to play it online before it actually arrives.
Franklin and his wife, who reside in Arroyo Seco, have been mountain biking for some time.
“We started riding in our early teens. I started racing when I was 15. I got brought to a local mountain bike race in Angel Fire and just had a great time, really enjoyed it and decided to do some more races the next year and even more after that,” Franklin said. “Pretty soon I moved to the pro category that was sort of my route to becoming a pro.” Schulz started racing in college. “After college we both decided to pursue it as a career and have been able to do that as a career since about 2014,” Franklin said.
The mountain bike community has been very supportive in making the board game project a reality, according to Franklin.
“It’s been really neat,” he said. “Not everybody is into board games but I think enough people are that people sort of came out and said wow there never has been a mountain biking board game this is filling a need that I didn’t even realize was there. People are very excited about it and are definitely into the project and leaving lots of comments and recommendations and it’s been really fun.”