Take Your Marks - Tabletop Athletics, No Maths Required
28 July 2026
The Commonwealth Games athletics is on at Scotstoun this week, which is a decent reminder that track and field barely exists on the tabletop. Plenty of football, baseball and golf. Almost nothing that lets you sit down with two dice and run a meet.
Take Your Marks is a print-and-play tabletop athletics game across the ten classic track-and-field events. Roll 2d6, read the finished time or distance straight off the chart, then roll a d10 for the final digit. No points conversion, no decathlon scoring, no maths at the table. An event takes two minutes. A full ten-event meet with a medal table takes an evening.
Every athlete is two things and nothing else: a Grade from 1 to 10, and a Lean, the event family they specialise in. A sprinter blisters the 100m and bombs the shot put.
What's in the pack
Eleven print-ready documents, 54 pages, and an offline browser app.
- The rules, the ten event tables, a meet scoresheet and the narrative tables
- Roll Up an Athlete - a grade curve, d66 names, nations and temperaments. A fresh eight-strong final in two minutes, or a whole national squad in ten
- The Championship - heats, fastest losers, qualifying standards for the field events, team scoring and a medal table
- The Circuit - a seven-meet season where every athlete nominates one meet to peak at. Form, injury, world rankings, ageing and retirement
- The Six Nations - Valoria, Kestria, Marenza, Sundara, Norvik and Talis, what each is good at, and ten editions of the Meridian Games already on the roll of honour
- Athlete cards nine to a page, and a records and almanac sheet
- The Meet Roller app - one HTML file, runs offline in any browser, editable field, JSON import and export
The athletes and nations are invented, so it never goes out of season and never plays the same way twice. If you would rather use real athletes, the rulebook includes the method for rating anyone from their personal best.
Two dice, a printer and a pencil. Take your marks.