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Jeff Horger
United States
Columbus
Ohio
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I want to make it clear that this game is not comparable to any other sports game that I know of when it comes to replaying a season. When you finish the season you will not have a collection of won-lost records, though you will have a good view of the standings in the league. You will not know the scoring and rebounding or assist averages of the league's all-stars but you can see who they are at a glance. This game is far more of a game than any simulation that I have played on this sport or any other. And that was Carla's & my goal.
So enough of what it is not. What is it? The game is broken into two distinct halves, the regular season and the playoffs. The regular season is a card game where you manipulate the standings boards to move teams up and down within their conference and division. I don't know how many of you have seen those little magnetic standings boards that you can track the NBA seasons on but I fondly remember them from my youth. Even when I was 12 or 13 I was trying to make simple games using those boards to place teams. It only took about 30 years but I managed to come up with a competitive way to do this.
At the same time you are trying to build your teams for the playoff run. Oh yeah, you control multiple teams and are trying to get at least one of your teams into the playoffs. You build your team by improving the players and bench depth on your teams. The better you make the positions, the better the team will be in the playoffs, but it doesn't help in the standings. Finally, there is a possibility for many ties in the standings due to the look-down level that we used for the game. Some way to break ties was required. We settled on "Bonus" tokens. These tokens represent key wins against other top teams and when two or more teams are tied the Bonus tokens will break that tie. The bonus tokens also have a benefit in the playoffs so they serve a dual purpose but neither of those purposes are overpowered.
The regular season portion takes 24-30 minutes to play regardless of the number of people in the game. When it is over, you will have 16 unique teams advance to the playoffs for the big show.
Next up: The Playoffs
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Jeff Horger
United States
Columbus
Ohio
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I have a love hate relationship with sports games. I have been endlessly enthralled with them for as long as I can remember and they are my first gaming memories. My first sports game would have been an electric football board. I quickly adopted to the cardboard versions with Bowl Bound, Statis-Pro Basketball, SherCo Baseball and others. Some before I was 10 years old. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the heart of Buckeye country and I knew from a very early age that I would be attending the Ohio State University not because of their high academic standards but because of Woody Hayes and the scarlet & gray.
As I got older sports games began to lose a bit of their appeal to me. As I ran out of time to play full seasons due to school, girls, work... you know the drill; I found that sports games held less and less appeal. I much prefer the grind of a full-season replay over a one-off match or even a short playoff series. I am captivated by the numbers and the records. The advent of computer games stirred a renewed interest for me but sadly most people took to the fantasy version as opposed to the simulation version. I have no love for fantasy sports, I would rather play a game that let's you create your own teams and duel it out. Even if the players are fictional.
Of course the problem with playing a whole season of any sport is the time commitment involved. It is completely unrealistic to set up a season of my favorite sports games and expect to get the players to show up week in and week out. That is no disrespect to my friends and fellow gamers but a nod to the fact that life happens and the best laid plans go to... well they go poorly.
For the past 10-15 years I have been pondering how to make a sports game that can play an entire season in not just an evening but in an hour or less. It was a tall order and I doubted for a while that I could pull it off but it always remained one of my Holy Grails of game design. Then last summer it hit me. I don't know exactly when or exactly what the context was, but it hit me out of the blue. Furiously I scribbled down a few notes and a diagram or two. At the time I was deep into the final work on Fury so it got put aside until September when I pulled it back out of the notebook and tried to make sense of 4 month-old notes. Much of it came back to me, some didn't make any sense and other things came to mind.
By the Buckeye Game Fest 2011 I felt that the game was good enough to begin play testing. Little did I know that I would find a publisher there shortly after the third play test of the game ever. That led me on a fast and furious accelerated play test and development schedule. Just 4 months after the game was designed, it is now completed in its prototype form. It just needs to get spruced up with some graphics and some rules editing. But it feels done to me, done enough to put up a page here on BGG and begin blogging about it.
Over the next months and years I will continue to blog here about various aspects of the game, the development process and hopefully how the design comes together. Thanks for giving me your time and thanks for letting me share this experience with you.
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