Another Season of The Football Game

Another boardgame night last night with Ara, Jack, Liam, Mike and Nic giving The Football Game another run. I think the game works better now with having learnt to have a diverse colour (ideally two of each) and positional (again at least two, though your midfielders can cover shortfalls) squad with plenty in reserve (2-3 players). When its your turn also thinking about a B squad playing to ensure your star players don't get injured (that last lesson I didn't learn as last time we played injuries were almost non-existent).

I think there's a still a high degree of luck so you can’t take it too seriously (Liam nearly won when he took over Nic's team half way through the night so maybe that’s not true). Well done Jack on holding him off and winning the season.

We were discussing how this game could be made into a fun wargame, and by having it set in Nazi-occupied Europe with each player recruiting / managing a cell of resistance fighters competing against each other to fight ze Germans. A bit like ‘Allo ‘Allo. Trading fighters amongst cells and drawing missions with a set colour combinations (instead of the dice) would add some randomness. This would also eliminate the double black dice twice in a row situation that we had in last night's game. Event and injury cards effect the person who’s turn it is.

In addition I also worked out the probability on the dice as it was annoying me that I knew each combination wasn't equally possible. The first die is yellow, yellow, red, red, blue, black and the second die is yellow, red, blue, blue, black, black (I'm not 100% sure on the pairings here, but the spread is right).

While getting a certain colour on at least one of the dice (44.44%) and a double (5.56%) is the same for all four colours, it’s the pairs of colours that aren’t the same. And getting any same colour pair (e.g. black and black) is higher than I thought at 22.22%.

If you’re looking for yellow AND red (or blue AND black) there’s a 11.11% probability, but looking for a pair that aren’t dominate on the same die (e.g. yellow AND blue) gives 13.89% odds. Very slight advantage but with 20 rolls in a 5 player game it could make the difference.

Still love the subtlety in this game and the stress of not peaking too early, but not peaking too late in case you have injuries!