Making A Footy Game: Part 1

We like board games.

We also like football.

And (this is an untested theory) we are creative.

So it stands to reason that, given these traits, we could create a football game that isn’t 100% terrible. That’s what we’ll be attempting to do on this journey. And we’re inviting you to follow us on this trip to success or failure. So praise, criticise and heckle us to your hearts content. Because we’re doing this anyway.

First we needed some rules. It turns out, games need a sh**load of rules. So rather than bore you with all 6,321 pages of them, how about we just state the aim of the game.

2–4 players. In a league. Battling it out. Simple… right?

We eventually settled on a deck-building style of game. You assemble your team of 5-aside players, trading them in and out as you attempt to beat each of your opponents twice and be crowned champion.

After that, we needed some players. Of course, we didn’t want to infringe on any copyrights so we created a batch of entirely fictional players with no relationship whatsoever to any pre-existing footballers. None. What. So. Ever.

I drew these photo-realistic images by hand

Then we took it for a spin.

We lined up our teams and went head to head. And it was certain to go smoothly of course. We had rules. Players. Stats. And enthusiasm. What more could anyone need?

Shockingly, there was a some debate over the first rule of the game. And the second. And the third. And well, basically we played the game for about 6 seconds and spent the other 5 hours debating how little sense the game made.

Someone should really tell you that making up rules to a game in five minutes while you wait at the bus stop isn’t that great an idea.

So we added a whole bunch of other things to make the game more realistic. And fun.

The first thing we did was add dice as a modifier, to stop it turning into a poor mans version of Top Trumps. We needed the luck element because, let’s face it, no matter how perfectly you assemble a squad in real life there’s always a chance for an underdog story or an upset. We needed to reflect that in our game. It’s no good if Neymar, I mean — Jaybar, scores every time because his shooting is 5 (also CAN HE DO IT ON A COLD RAINY NIGHT IN STOKE???).

Then we added a whole bunch of special traits to the players, as well as introducing the manager cards.

This fictional manager seems as if he were, at some point in history, one of the best in the business before falling ignominiously from grace. Just a vibe I’m getting.

Adding this to each team ensured that certain restrictions or boosts during different points in the game created a whole bunch of random weirdness and variety.

And this is how we stumbled upon one of the core pillars of our game. Variety. We have to take every measure possible to introduce the same level of unpredictability in every turn of our game that exists within the real game of football.

This probably sounds obvious to any and all board game fans, but remember — we have no idea what we’re doing.

But it wasn’t enough. Sure, you might be restricted by not being able to pass it long and were able to flip the tables by firing off an unstoppable Thunderbastard from Tom-Farmer Risha. But there was still weren’t enough ways to effect a match dynamically once it had begun. So in came the Event cards.

These weird and wonderful cards allowed us to revisit famous football-isms and create bizarre scenarios that put players in severe advantageous (Lets be honest — mostly disadvantageous) positions.

Then we dived back in and started spinning up as many different ways to replicate the beautiful game as we could.

This is called the ‘my team is shite’ look of desperation.

What we ended up with was a game of phases, turnovers, tactics and luck.

It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it never will. But if definitely feels like somewhere in there, is a half decent game.

The list of problems is infinite at this point. The stats are horribly unbalanced (Barry Wane is definitely a 5-star player IMO). Some of the event cards are an absolute piss-take. And WTF is the speed stat for?

But for now, all we need to do is keep playing and solve these problems one by one.

How the F**k did I end up in this scenario?

So we may still not have a solitary clue WTF we’re doing. But I think we got at least little closer to figuring out what this game will look like in a few months time.

The ‘Free-kicks are bulls**t’ debate

But to get to that point, we need more testers. So if you’re interested in finding out a bit more about what we’re cooking up or joining in one of our play sessions. Drop us a line. With your help we’ll make this game as not-terrible as it can be.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for more updates on how badly it’s all going.