First try of APBA Soccer

As hoped, Dennis, Teresa and Mom bought me APBA Soccer for my birthday last week. Patrick and I were able to give it a quick try last weekend, with Patrick taking 2010 Barcelona and me taking 2010 Inter Milan. Barcelona won 1-0.

My first impressions are mixed. The good news is that it's a nice enough game. It definitely feels like you're watching a soccer game. Note, however, that I said "watching." It's probably the nature of the sport that, unlike American football, where the coach calls plays, once you set your starting 11 and pick a formation, your job is done until you feel the need to switch.

One exception, that I feel is the most creative part of the game, is the "clutch points" system. Each team starts with a certain number of clutch points. Better teams start with more, so, for example, Barcelona starts with 10. These points can be "cashed in" to alter the game. For example, a few minutes into our game, I cashed in 5 clutch points so that a red card on my center back would be "discussed by the referees" and turned into a yellow card. Patrick used 5 points for his goalie to make a great save.

Part of what makes APBA Baseball so enjoyable is its elegance. Roll on the card; look on a chart. Eighty percent of the time you'll know the result without even looking. But part of the problem with APBA Football, Hockey and Basketball was the amount of bookkeeping required. At some points the amount of calculating and re-calculating in those games makes it feel like you're doing your taxes. Every lineup change requires re-calculating various numbers. The bad news is that APBA Soccer does require a new set of calculations every time a lineup change occurs. The good news is that lineup changes are less frequent in soccer than in the other sports.

My biggest complaint about APBA Soccer is the awful rulebook. The rulebook is poor from a technical standpoint, an editing standpoint and an aesthetic standpoint. I plan to write a full review at BoardGameGeek, but the rulebook looks like it was typed -- literally, on a typewriter -- and then copied. Several parts are unclear or missing. So, while the author felt the need to explain the positions (something I'm guessing anyone who would buy the game would know), he or she didn't include such simple instructions as how to restart the game after an injury. Finally, while not everyone gets as worked up as I do about missing commas before independent clauses, there are parts of the rulebook with missing words and non-sentences.

APBA also made the decision to downsize their tables, presumably to save money. The irony is that, when I discovered APBA in the 1980s, I had a small budget and good eyes. I would have gladly made do with smaller boards in exchange for a lower price. Now I have more money but bad eyesight, and I really miss the big boards.

I'm looking forward to playing some more this weekend.

Excited about APBA Soccer

As regular readers know, I've been trying to locate an enjoyable soccer game for over a year. The boys and I had a good time last summer with The World Cup Card Game, but it's not really a simulation as much as a card game.

I played around last winter with several versions of my own soccer game. While the game was able to reproduce reasonable stats, it just wasn't fun.

Finally, last month I took All-Time Championship Soccer with me to Jamaica. The gameplay wasn't that enjoyable, and (at least for the few games I played) the results didn't strike me as all that realistic.

I'm hopeful, now that APBA may come to the rescue with its new soccer game. I've been an APBA fan since I bought their baseball game in 1981. The session report that I've read makes it sound fairly interesting. It might have a few things in common (understandably) with APBA Hockey. I bought APBA Hockey in 1994, and thought it was a slight improvement over Strat-O-Matic Hockey. My biggest complaint with both hockey games is their weak handling of line changes. Luckily, that's not an issue with soccer, so I'm hoepful that the game will be enjoyable.

I've officially told Dennis that I'd like APBA Hockey from the family for my birthday next month. In the meantime, I located the cards for the Irish National Team online. Looking at them with anticipation reminds me of the days I spent reading the brochure for APBA Baseball again and again in 1981 while waiting for it to arrive.

Premier League Soccer Game

I've been an amatuer game designer nearly as long as I can remember. I started 40 years ago -- making up my own games using a deck of cards when I was bored on Sunday afternoons at Grandma's house. I can recall playing Kingmaker for the first time in 1976 and then making up a simplified version the next day at school. A group of friends and I spent much of 7th grade English class playing my version of the game. Al and I developed a space exploration game (what today would be refered to as a 4x game) in 1983 that went under several names, including The Carl Sagan Game and Mercantilism. For much of the 1980s and early 1990s, Mercantilism was our group's most-played game. We probably would still play it, but Twilight Imperium has much the same feel (plus cool plastic pieces).

During the 1970s I created a number of sports games, including baseball, football and hockey. The baseball game was eventually replaced in 1981 by APBA, and the football game was eventually replaced in 1982 by Strat-o-Matic. The hockey alternatives, however, were always weak. I played dozens of games of Strat-o-Matic Hockey and APBA Hockey over the years, but wasn't impressed with either of them. So, my hockey game never really disappeared during this time. In fact, Rick, Fred, Al, Doug, Mike and I had a hockey league for three years using my game.

As I've mentioned before, both boys are really into soccer, especially the English Premier League. I've been trying to learn the players, and last week I came up with the idea of redoing my hockey game as a soccer game. So far, the game is a success; Patrick and I played three games last weekend pitting my Chelsea against his favorite Manchester City. Man City won the first game, 2-1, with a pair of goals from Carlos Tevez. (Frank Lampard notched the sole Chelsea tally.) The second game was all Chelsea; Didier Drogba's two goals combined with one each by Lampard and Nicolas Anelka for a 4-0 score. In the third game, Lampard and Tevez traded goals at the beginning of the second half, but Drogba's 60th-minute goal proved the difference-maker in a 2-1 Chelsea win.

So far the game is getting the stats right. Obviously the correct people are scoring, and given the final table from last season, it's not surprising that Chelsea would dominate (although interestingly enough, Man City did win both matches in the real season last year, with Tevez scoring two of their three goals). There are parts of the game that seem awfully repetitive to me, but to the extent that Patrick represents the target audience, the market research is coming back positive. Right now I'm working on adding yellow and red cards. The next step will be to sort out how formations will factor into the game.

Anyone willing to playtest should let me know.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Cont'd)

It was also during the summer of 1987 that I started helping Steve Stafford with his Strat-o-Matic Baseball team in a league at The Epic Gallery hobby shop. Steve's team in that league was also known as the New York City Corporate Raiders. We made the playoffs, but were eliminated in the first round.

We continued the APBA baseball league during the summer of 1988. Steve Stafford had to drop out because of a lack of time, so his team was taken over by Richard Philipak. Richard re-named one of the teams the Spectres. Also, Frank dropped out half-way through the season, and his teams were taken over by Kenn Leucke and Steven Erdmann. Al's two teams made it all of the way to the World Series, and the Medflys beat the Neanderthals to win the championship.

I moved away from St. Louis in August of 1988 to start graduate school, and although we finished a draft prior to a 1989 season, the season itself was never started, and our second attempt at a table-top baseball league came to an end.

In 2003, we decided to give it another try. I had bought Strat-o-Matic back in the 1990s just to see what the game was looking like. When I received the mailing in February 2003 I talked to Al and Dennis about starting a league, and we decide to give it a try. In addition to Al's (Greenwhich Meridians), Dennis's (Montauk Fighting Rainbow Trout) and my team (the St. Louis Crusaders), we were joined by Steven (The Gallifreyan Timelords), Jeff White (Metropolis Supermen) and Rick (Dallas Diamonds). The Crusaders won the 2003 World Series (defeating the Trout) and Al won the 2004 World Series (defeating the Diamonds). Mid-way through the 2005 season, we fell behind in our games, and we decided to jump straight to a playoff round. The Diamonds ended up winning the World Series (defeating the Timelords).

I don't honestly see us ever trying another league. However, I do think that we learned a number of lessons over the years. (1) It's important that league members reconcile themselves to the fact that "owners" vary in the amount of time that they can devote to the league. Members should have honest discussions prior to starting a league about the time commitment that's expected. Gung-ho members may need to accept the fact that not everyone shares their priorities. If they prefer a league with more games and/or extensive bookkeeping, they need to either find like-minded people or be prepared to accept a lower commitment level. (2) Members should think when creating the league about how to handle team openings. Members' lives will change, and people will move, gain new family commitments or just want to quit. (3) Every game's rules has "loopholes" that can be exploited -- things that allow players to "work the system" in an unrealistic manner. League members need to have in place a solid process for resolving these issues before they arise.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

The Major League Baseball season starts this Sunday, so it seems like a good time to talk about my favorite table-top baseball games.

The first table-top baseball game that I ever played actually belonged to my brother Dennis. It was a simple game -- you would roll two dice and read the result from a chart. I remember that double-twos was a double, double-threes was a triple and double-sixes was a homerun. The chart was actually printed on the back-side of a cardboard chessboard along with a football gridiron. Dennis received it as a gift from our Aunt Alice. To this day we refer to the old game as "Aunt Alice Baseball." Dennis played several shortened seasons using the game in the 1960s (while he was in high school). When I discovered the game in the early 1970s (along with Dennis's records from his old seasons) I was impressed enough that I started to play it as well.

Sometime in the late 1970s I started to realize that Aunt Alice Baseball's stats weren't all that realistic. I also wanted a game that could reproduce individual statistics for Major League players (rather than having every player use the same chart). Over the course of several years I tried to build my own baseball game using actual Major League players' stats. I can also remember making ratings/cards for the guys in our neighborhood and playing a shortened season (with the help of Paul Stephan and Hubert Synn) that put our "team" in a league with actual major league teams. (As an aside, I'm not sure what happened to Aunt Alice Baseball; it's probably somewhere in Mom's basement.)

During the Major League Players strike of 1981, Dennis read an article in Sport magazine describing APBA baseball. We mailed away (as we had to do in the pre-Internet days) to request a brochure describing the game. APBA sent back a glossy brochure and a sample card (of George Brett), and I was hooked. We ordered the game, and I can remember spending the next two weeks waiting every day for the mailman. Dennis, his (now ex-) wife Vicki and I ended up picking teams and starting a 32-game season. The games were a lot of fun (although the record keeping was tedious). The baseball strike ended in August, and as school started up again, we stopped playing our games. Sometime that summer I introduced APBA to Rick VerMehren, who ended up finishing our season.

That same summer, Paul Stephan bought Strat-o-Matic Baseball at our local hobby store (The Epic Gallery). We played a couple of games, but I wasn't that impressed. Looking back, what bothered me the most was that Strat-o-Matic (in those days) used a deck of cards with numbers printed on them rather than a die to resolve certain plays. (At some point Strat-o-Matic replaced the deck with a twenty-sided die.)

In 1982 a group of us started an APBA baseball league (where we drafted the players). My team was the Winnipeg Wilderness; Dennis had the Penguis; my cousin Fred had the Gotham City Batmen; Al had the California Medflys and Rick had the Dallas Diamonds. Also in the league were Paul Stephan, Doug Verseman and Paul Marxkors (although I can't remember their team names). As summer wore on, several of the guys lost interest, and we didn't finish the season.

During most of the 1980s, Rick and I continued playing shortened MLB seasons each year when the cards came out (although to be honest, Rick did most of the playing and 90% of the bookkeeping).

In 1986, a number of us from the 1982 league, plus Bill Lake and a few of his family members started a league using the Commodore-64 baseball game by SSI. Although the season was fun, and it was nice having the computer keep the stats, a number of us missed rolling the dice, so we switched the league over to APBA in 1987. However, since the 1982 league, Rick and I had discovered the APBA Master Game. The Master Game was the advanced version -- taking into account lefty-righty effects, pitcher fatigue, outfielder arms and various other "advanced" features. A few of the folks preferred sticking with the original (so-called Basic) APBA game, but most of us switched over to the Master Game.

There were nine of us in the league, with each person having two teams. I don't remember all of the team names, but the league included Mary (Houtson *s and Bay City Babes), Al (California Medflys and Newark Neanderthals), Mike (El Paso Desperadoes and New Hampshire Minutemen), Doug (Delaware Destroyers and Louisville Sluggers), Rick (Indianapolis Turbos and Dallas Diamonds), Frank (Sparta Spartans and the Doc's), Fred (Honolulu Hurricanes and California Coolers), Steve (NYC Corporate Raiders) and me (Pocatello Penguins and Winnipeg Wilderness). As I recall, Rick's Diamonds beat my Penguins in the World Series that year.

... to be continued.