Throughout history, nothing has affected culture as much as what that culture chose to do with their leisure time. Whether they preferred complicated games of strategy, or rough-and-tumble, physical, exercises of strength and stamina, these games define a culture, as well as provide diversion.

You may want to give some thought to the games and sports in your fantasy realms. After all, your characters will have some leisure time when they aren't slaying dragons, rescuing damsels in distress, etc. etc. There are basically three ways I can think of to incorporate games and sports into your worlds:

1. Take directly from "Real Life"
Self-explanatory. You take a game that exists in real life and put it into your world with little or no modification. (ie: Wizard Chess in Harry Potter)

2. Modified from "Real Life"
Start with a foundation, such as basketball, and add or change elements to reflect your cultures unique circumstances and surroundings.

3. A mixture of games from "Real Life"
Just mix and match features from sports and games that exist in real life. A modified example seems to be Quidditch from Harry Potter, which is apparently a mixture of soccer (football), basketball, hockey, and cricket, all on flying broomsticks.

4. From scratch *gasp!*
This may be intimidating, but keep yourself grounded by remembering:
A. The culture and people in you realm
Your game MUST be derived from the people playing it, their attitudes and necessities. Remember to try and think as if you were one of your characters trying to invent the game, what he would want in a leisure game. Are your characters rich? Lazy? Smart? Do they have only one arm, which would make games like basketball impractical?

B. What points are for
If you integrate a points system in your game, do NOT pick a number arbitrarily. The purpose of points are to value different scores you can make. If you can only make one score it should be valued at one. (Soccer) If you can a make two or three types of scores, value them in order of difficulty. (Basketball) Get the idea?

Hopefully this helps some of you with ideas. I look forward to hearing of the exciting sports and games you come up with.

PS: I haven't taken the time to look in all the forums to see if this thread already exists in some guise. If it does, I crave your forgiveness, and apologize for lack of originality

Thanks for this thread, it has some valuable thoughts in it!

I've only thought up one game yet and I haven't really developed it all that much yet...It uses a flying disc (like a frisbee), everyone is on a team and tries to keep it from touching the ground, but here's the catch: you can't catch it, you have to 'airbrush' it, hit it with your hand in the same direction as the spin, thereby propelling it forward and keeping it spinning and therefore stable.
The game was invented to promote coordination, muscle control, teamwork, agility (sometimes they play this on rough ground and have to leap pretty far to get near the disc before it lands), and simple endurance (the score is kept with some kind of a time-keeping thing, the longer the time the better). So this game was thought up as a fun way to stay in shape and practice skills that will be used in wartime.

Have you invented any games for your world?

Nope, not yet, currently my world is a bunch of thoughts, concepts, names and characters running around in my head.

Great breakdown! I need to work on this for my fantasy cultures. Trouble is, the culture I'm currently developing has a very work-based attitude... They don't esteem leisure time very highly. So I am trying to figure out a balance with that. This will be helpful once I get to figuring out actual games and sports.

Good post, Loki.

Great job, Loki. I really injoyed reading this. This is a little bit of a game I came up with from scratch, Thinking about the culture and people in my realm.

You just gave me an idea for my dwarves, Danko.

Really?!?! Well, sweet!

Do we get to hear the idea?