Front Office Football: The Card Game

Front Office Football: The Card Game is my first venture into the world of physical board and card games. It's a deck-construction game for two players that simulates professional football.

My goal with the game was to simulate how professional football coaches approach game-planning and play-calling in a quick and exciting battle of minds.

Overview

For a long time, I've wanted to create a football board or card game to recapture those dice-and-paper moments from my childhood and early adulthood. There are many good products on the market today, but it wasn't until I played the popular deck-building games of recent years that I realized they added a dimension to this type of game I haven't seen elsewhere. And that dimension very closely matches a lot of material I've read about how coaches approach game-planning.

Front Office Football: The Card Game gives you the opportunity to build a playbook just like the pros, then execute your game plan in an exciting card game shaped by the simulation of tens of millions of plays.

Purchase

Originally, I planned on funding this project through Kickstarter. My intent was to try and make a decent profit and sell a few thousand of these games. Unfortunately, it's not what the market wanted right now, and Kickstarter gave me the opportunity to find that out without losing a lot of money.

Some of you did express interest in the game, however, so I wanted to make it available. I published the game through GameCrafter. You can buy it here for $74.

Yes, that's a lot. Basically, GameCrafter prints each sold copy when it's ordered. This is quite expensive. I am not making a profit on these sales (actually, I'm making 14 cents because I can't set the purchase price to exactly my wholesale cost of $73.85). I'm not trying to do anything here other than make the finished product available.

GameCrafter does a decent job printing. I'm happy with the results. You get a nice game board, dice, wooden scoring markers, and all 564 cards. This includes 12 cards for each of the 32 professional teams. Yes, that's a lot of cards, and why the wholesale cost is so high. I'm thinking of putting out a separate "Chicago versus Green Bay" version which would cost much less. But that would be it. No special requests - the separate versions take hours, and, again, there's no profit in this.

I do appreciate your support, and I hope some people end up enjoying this game even though it's not the next Ticket to Ride or Strat-O-Matic.

Project Details

To give you a better idea of Front Office Football: The Card Game, I've put the manual online.

Page 1: Cover	Page 2: Overview	Page 3: Setup
Page 4: Game Play	Page 5: Play Results	Page 6: Run Play Example
Page 7: Pass Plays	Page 8: Pass Play Example	Page 9: Audibles
Page 10: Appendix	Page 11: Appendix	Page 12: Appendix

Up and Down the River

To learn about our (old) computer card game, released in 2008, please visit the Up and Down the River page. There's plenty of information and a free time-limited, full-feature demo.