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By Root 794 0

even harder to describe than it is to master. As a kid, I would see regular ads for the Massacre in Games magazine, and I imagined the event as a freewheeling scavenger hunt through the atlas—exactly the kind of thing I would have loved at that age, though I never actually signed up. The reality of the event, I see as Jim and I peruse last year’s contest booklet, is very different.

Here’s a sample step from the third of the rally’s eight legs, this one between Paris, Ontario, and Eden Park, Ohio:

8. After having gone through U.S. 24 shield on page 51, turn on highway whose number comprises two digits and that is upon a limited-access highway in the direction that’s toward nearest other unnumbered interchange.

If you can parse and negotiate that instruction correctly, you must then answer a multiple-choice question about your chosen route:

Q27. Which among these do you see first?

a. Bowling Green

b. Ohio Tpk.

c. Pemberville

d. Scotch Ridge

Questions like these are the equivalent of the manned checkpoints at a real road rally: they test whether or not you’ve followed the course successfully. Jim and his collaborators cleverly “fail-safe” each step of the way, so that even when you miss a turn or a trick, you generally get looped back onto the correct route without ever realizing your misstep.

The devious traps built into each step typically rely, in equal parts, on careful observation and hair-splitting interpretation of the contest’s rules. You might think a “road” is the same as a “named highway,” for example, but not in the Massacre: here, they’re very different. (A road is the line on the map, and it may carry one named highway, like “Interstate 25” or “Iowa 42,” along its path, or several at the same time, or none at all.) “Course following”—how to navigate the road between the end of one instruction and the beginning of the next—seems like a simple concept, but in practice it requires a set of four tiebreaking rules of decreasing priority, each so complex that even the word “on” comes with its own Clintonian three-paragraph definition. Even punctuation matters: a place-name without quotation marks refers to the place itself, but with quotation marks, it refers to the map text labeling the place. And so on.

This level of precision can sometimes make the Massacre seem airless and technical to clueless newbies like me, but Jim insists that’s not the goal. “We try to make the rules correspond to reality,” he tells me. “We try to keep as much verisimilitude as we can, to have people actually feel like they’re on the road, going from this point to that point. They’re seeing landmarks along the way. They’re watching for turns.” For longtime participants, much of the fun lies in the in-jokes and regular “characters” that pop up en route, adding some color to the otherwise legalistic proceedings. The most beloved such regular is the Old Maltese, a grizzled coot often spotted near his cabin in Malta, Montana. The Maltese is Jim’s alter ego in the yearly contest, and the Sinclairs still get phone calls at home every February asking if “the Old Maltese is there.” (Participants are encouraged to call or write if they don’t understand the rules.) “I always say, ‘He’s not in, but can I help you?’” says Jim.

These recurring traditions have kept the same players coming back to his contests for decades. They are a devoted bunch. Nancy Wilson, a retired ER nurse from Petaluma, California, has been playing in the Massacre for more than thirty years. She once scheduled a trip to Liechtenstein just so that she could postmark her Massacre answer sheet from the tiny Alpine country. (Jim makes sure to recognize the top score submitted from each state and country.) Bart Bramley is a professional bridge player from Dallas (the American Contract Bridge League player of the year in 1997, in fact) and a four-time winner of the Massacre. His nearsightedness has been getting worse of late, but he’s put off getting the LASIK surgery that would cure his myopia in minutes. Why? Because now, without contacts, his vision is clearest when