Will APBA’s Pro Soccer game score a goal?

soccer_box_big APBA has now been taking pre-orders for its new Pro Soccer Board Game for some time.  APBA President Marc Rinaldi made the rules available in pdf form for the game which is due out very soon.  

I enjoy watching soccer on occasion but don’t really follow the game.  If you do though, it looks like it might certainly be worth a look especially considering the lower price point.  The game is $22 and the cards are $20 at APBA’s website.  Still not cheap, I know, but less so than the other sports.  I know others are really looking forward to playing the game. 

A couple reasons APBA Soccer might succeed:

  • while Soccer (the sport) doesn’t enjoy immense success in America (though it is gaining), it IS the most popular sport in the world.  The goal (no pun intended) is get the fans out of the stadiums for a while to play a tabletop game.
  • from what I am reading, APBA Pro Soccer Board Game is one of the first serious soccer tabletop games out there.  With the Company breaking ground like this, that gives them a good headway into the “soccer tabletop” market, such as it is. 

Also, it might be a good business move by APBA Company to branch out into a untapped sport like soccer.  There might be many sports fans out there intrigued enough to give APBA a try based on the new game.  How many of those new fans are also baseball fans who might buy the APBA Baseball Game?  I’m not sure either but hopefully the Company has done their metrics and foreseen this. 

Regarding game play, APBA claims its soccer game is not a play-by-play simulation (thank goodness).   Rather it is more of a statistical representation.  From their rules:

 

 

APBA Pro Soccer is designed to be statistically accurate in its results, allow for player input, and create a flow of play that provides ease and enjoyable game play. We have not attempted to reproduce a play-by-play simulation but have included all facets of soccer and still allow you to complete a full game in less than 1 hour.

 

If you want more information on the APBA Pro Soccer Board Game, start with the Rules put out by the APBA Company.  If you want even more info and don’t mind parsing through the chaff, you might want to check out a couple threads on the Between the Lines forum here and here

Again, I’m not a huge soccer fan but I hope the soccer game does well for APBA’s sake. 

Thomas Nelshoppen

I am an IT consultant by day and an APBA media mogul by night. My passions are baseball (specifically Illini baseball), photography and of course, APBA. I have been fortunate to be part of the basic game Illowa APBA League since 1980 as well as the BBW Boys of Summer APBA League since 2014. I am slogging through a 1966 NL replay and hope to finish before I die.

6 Comments:

  1. “Soccer is such a boring game that …”

    There are many ending to that sentence. All of them are true.

    Today’s ending: “… I fell asleep in the second paragraph of this ARTICLE about Soccer.”

    If soccer becomes popular in America, Sominex will go out of business.

  2. It’s interesting how polarizing soccer is both within the APBA community and just in general.

    I hear a lot of comments like yours, Don but I go to the APBA forum and there seem to be people who are really excited about the game.

    Soccer may look boring to us Americans but when I talk about it with international grad students I work with, they are passionate about it.

    just sayin’

  3. I love watching soccer (and playing soccer until my something happens to my legs, which is usually 10 minutes now at my age and level of fitness).

    It’s very difficult to simulate a game where “flow” is the most important aspect. Playing the full version of APBA Basketball was tedious in the extreme – it would take 10 times as long as real life. Playing the “express” version of Basketball, though, was interesting and enjoyable- something you could do in reasonable time and get good statistics out of.

    I can’t see them making a good game out of soccer, however. I spend a long time back in the 60s trying to come up with a decent hockey game (along the lines of APBA basketball “express”), and it was never much fun – too little scoring.

  4. The flow of soccer is the thing that people who don’t like soccer don’t seem to get – when I was watching the World Cup, it seemed like I couldn’t turn away from the screen. While scoring is rare, any individual move into opposing territory could lead to a scoring opportunity and that made it difficult to turn away. It would be like a baseball game where a lot of runners were reaching base and getting stranded at 3rd, but ending with a low score. And that’s with me as a pretty unknowledgable soccer fan – if I understood the defensive strategies involved I might be able to see the weaknesses and strengths of each team more easily and get more enjoyment of it.

    I do find that I like World Cup and the like better than stuff like MLS; the higher quality of athletes makes a big difference.

  5. Got the game yesterday. There’s a couple of contradictory rules that need to be cleaned up, and having the charts in a book rather than on a board made for a longer-than-it-should-be first game. Took me 2 hours but I played the extra time because it was a tie. Once I get the hang of it, and make a board out of the charts, I would say it will probably be 60-75 minutes for a regulation game and 75-90 if it goes into OT. Nothing looked terribly out of line for the stats, however that was just one game.

    It flows very similar to the hockey board game — 2 sequences per minute where a sequence is most likely going to be a simple dice roll but can go up to 4 if you’re dealing with a shot situation. The card #s translate to different results depending on the offensive formation (3 possible), defensive formation (3 possible) and the spot the ball is on the field (7 possible). What really speeds up play is the control ranking system. When you place your lineup out, you place them in order of how often they would touch the ball rather than positions. The numbers on the chart for passes refer to those ordinals, so you’re brain will quickly memorize where 1 is, 2 is, etc. However, the #s don’t flow exactly how we would expect an APBA card to do (there might be a 2 on 66 followed by a 1 on 11).

    If you like soccer, it’s a good game. If you don’t like soccer, you’re going to hate it.

  6. I just got the soccer game last weekend, it is my first ever APBA game, I play strat-o-matic and on the pc play Dave Koch games. While I did find the game a bit labor intensive, I am really enjoying it. I had to re-type some of the back charts to make it easy (and faster) to determine results and that seemed to work well. ALL of the replay games have been very realistic and not to mention exciting…a game won in the 89th minute after the other team had to play a man-down after two yellow cards. I had a game decided by a penalty kick and all of the matches (four so far) have been decided by one goal.

    The directions could be a little easier and like most, I agree that the charts should be easier to read and not in book format. But, that is nit-picky. I do wish that the game could be played in a shorter amount of time. But, for soccer enthusiasts I HIGHLY give my recommendation.

    I bought the 2010-11 MLS and EPL and can’t wait to play more.

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