Squiggle Football (PC Game)

Squiggle Football is a card game made by Max Barry where you use football cards to create a strong football team in the hopes of winning a Premiership.

There are a nice variety of team names and colours, there are some really interesting team names, the town names are really which is pretty cool.

You start off in the basic bush league and work your way up to the National League, each league has a greater difficulty and present new challenges.

When you start, you have the choice of three players to fill a position, while their skills are important, you also got to think about things like will they be around next season, will they improve or regress next season? Will they change positions next season?

The question of improving, regressing and retiring is important as it will affect your coaching in the future.

After you pick your initial team, you pick an assistant coach, and they have strengths and weaknesses and then you pick two game plans.

Now it is time to pick which strategy you’ll pick and where your players will lineup, on the top left will be your team’s total strength and the right side will show the opposition.

Your chances of winning are in the middle, in this case it is a 62% chance, pretty good odds.

Now it is time to play some footy, sit back and relax and hope that you will get the above sort of screen, as you see my team won 6.9 – 45 to 5.6 – 36 for those not familiar with Australian Rules Football, the first number is goals, one goal is worth six points so six goals equals 36 points, the second number is points, each point is worth one so 9 points plus the 36 equals 45.

The line that you see up the top is how the game progressed, it was an even battle in the first half, I was behind in the third quarter, got behind again in the last quarter before three goals gave me a 9 point victory.

Eventually your season will come to an end either in regular season or in the finals, you are even a season review which includes a summary, awards for your players, player retirements and a rundown of all the games that season.

After the review comes the board meeting, while winning is important, you also have to satisfy the board of your club, you can be sacked for a variety of reasons, you could win too few games, or you could have too many player retirements weakening your team for next season.

As you can see above, I was a successful Premiership winning coach with a great 24-5 record and most of those losses came in my third season but because most of my players retired, the board voted 3-2 to give me the sack.

Now I can understand how Stan Alves felt, sure he did not win a Premiership for St. Kilda in 1997, but he coached them to the 1997 Grand Final and a finals appearance in 1998 and he still got the sack and St. Kilda hit rock bottom just a few years later.

There is one bonus to the game, when you play seasons you get packs of cards, these cards give you potential new players and add to the challenge of the game, a few good cards could put your team on top easily.

Overall, I like this game though I have haven’t made it to the National League, it is always fun to try and get as far as I can before getting the sack.

Rating: 4 out of 5.