Billy Hamilton's Football Academy (1985)

Many have tried and failed to encapsulate the world of football in a board game. Whether it be the thrill of scoring goals in a big match or the mental discipline required to manage a great team, you can be sure it's been recreated at some point for the purpose of entertaining children and their families.

Among the lesser-known titles is Billy Hamilton's Football Academy, a game supposedly conceived by the erstwhile Oxford United, QPR and Northern Ireland striker. I want to believe this is true, and there's nothing to suggest it wasn't, save for a bit of tinkering by the board game manufacturers. I say this because Hamilton's express wish appears to be to detail every aspect of a player's career from being a humble apprentice through to winning the World Cup (potentially, at least).

Detail is very much the watchword in this game as can be seen on the board which is dazzling in all its colourful splendour. The playing area is circular and has concentric tracks flooded with illustrations and text that provide all the intrigue and fascination that make you want to play in the first place.

Between two and six people can take part, and the object is to travel around the board initially as a football trainee collecting Skill and Effort tokens by rolling a dice. The outer ring of the board is where the action takes place in this first part of three, and the messages found on many of the spaces show where Billy Hamilton's own experience comes into play. "You volunteer for extra training - Gain 2 Effort" and "Manager adds you to first team squad - Gain 2 Skill" give an insight into the continuing struggle to improve as a young player.

But there's also a notable mention of the more menial tasks that have to be done when you're setting out at the bottom rung of the football ladder. One space instructs you to "Sweep the terraces - grab a broom" whereas others speak of clearing snow, running a bath, cleaning boots or 'making a nice pot of tea for the pro's after training'. There's no denying Hamilton's intent to show the less glamorous side of being a footballer alongside the fame and adulation, and this adds to the charm of the game.

There's also the chance to gain or lose tokens by picking up a 50/50 card or a Linesman's Flag card. Once again, the devil's in the detail as you're told "You have put the wrong studs in the 1st Team's boots - Lose 2 Effort" or "Linesman flags as you control the ball with your hand - Lose 1 Effort". And you wondered why this game wasn't endorsed by Diego Maradona...

Three circuits of the outer section of the board have to be completed before moving onto the second part of the game, and if I'm honest, those three circuits get less interesting the longer they go on. Though the messages and the collecting of the tiny plastic tokens starts out as being quite enjoyable, it does get a little tedious towards the end. No matter, because the next bit of the game concentrates on being a fully qualified professional, but before that can be done, there's some mathematics to attend to.

To determine the position you're going to play in for the rest of your career, you first need to divide the number of blue Effort tokens you received by three, then add that number to the amount of red Skill tokens you've accumulated. If the total is 19 or below, your lot in life is to become a goalkeeper; 20 to 24 and you'll be a defender, 25 to 29 and you're a midfielder whereas 30 or more ensures your fate will sealed as a striker.

Being a striker undoubtedly gives you a strong chance of winning the game, because in Part 2, you travel around your positional track on the board taking instructions from whatever the rule book tells you. Suffice to say that the rule book has more favourable messages for the strikers than it does for the goalkeepers.

Goalies roll the dice and move around the ring of green shirts, while the defenders are on the orange ring, the midfielders are on the blue and the strikers are on the pink. When you land on a space, you use the relevant number to look up the accompanying message in the book. The optimal outcome is to collect one or more goal tokens in readiness for the final part of the game and many of the messages provide in this respect. "Save a penalty - gain 2 goals" or "Score with an overhead kick - gain 2 goals" could be the outcome, but you may just as likely be dealt a slice of life with the message "Visit a supporter in hospital" or "Interviewed on local radio" that carry no goal tokens. In this instance the game falls a little bit flat as by now you're purely focused on gaining goal tokens. Are you really bothered if you've 'entered a fun-run for charity' or 'visited a children's home'?

Any such interest in the minutiae of being a footballer starts to fall away quickly by the time you reach the final inner circle of the board, for it's here that you enter the 'International Stage'. An extra dice comes into play now as you attempt to traverse the last 18 spaces quicker than your opponents. The skill comes in 'pledging' the right number of goal tokens (those pleasing flat yellow plastic footballs) to ensure the right result on the dice. By adding your tokens to the number on the black dice, then subtracting the number on the white dice you end up with the number of spaces you move forward. If it's a minus number, you move backwards.

Any goal tokens you pledge go back to the bank, so it's vital to land on a space where you earn more tokens to keep you going. "You make your international debut - gain 2 goals" is the sort of thing you want to hear at this point, whereas "Go to tailors and measure up for a squad travelling suit" probably isn't.

Anyway, without really being fully aware, the final ring of yellow spaces is leading you to eventual glory as a World Cup Winner, but it's an anti-climactic finish that lacks all the triumphant messaging you want to see as you reach the peak of your footballing career. Not only that, but as I found in playing the game, you can easily run out of goal tokens before you even reach the end, thus highlighting an unfortunate shortcoming of the game.

When the end does come, however, you're left with conflicting feelings about the hour that's just passed. On the one hand, you have to admire the effort that's gone into the making of the game, from the delightful coloured football boots that act as playing pieces, right through to the real-world instructions on the board and the ease with which you can get started without reading copious notes that are hard to understand. Unfortunately the element of submersing yourself in the fantasy of being an actual footballer weakens as the game progresses. There's less need to chuckle at the wording as you realise it's all about gaining tokens and getting to the middle of the board first, which is a shame.

For all that, however, there's not a football board game in the world that's perfect and for that reason it has to rank among the better ones that are available. Well done, Mr Hamilton - you may not be a World Cup Winner, but you certainly gained 2 Effort where I'm concerned.

-- Chris Oakley

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Waddington's Quiz Card Games - Football (1979)

When it comes to football card games, you’re nobody unless you have the words ‘Top’ and ‘Trumps’ on your packet. Yet if the passing of time tells us nothing, it shows that every once in a while, a new title would come along in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of young football-loving children everywhere.

One such title was made by Waddingtons, the iconic name linked with all-time classic board games such as Monopoly, Risk and er… Wheel of Fortune. In 1979, Waddingtons hit upon the idea of producing sets of cards featuring quiz questions on various subjects, one of which was Football. Others included Cricket, Pop Music and, bewilderingly, the Highway Code, but whatever the subject they all had the same basic gameplay.

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Random football

It might not be the best-known or most-played football game, but Logacta has proven to be something of a revelation here on The Football Attic. Ever since I wrote about it back in February 2013, my article has been read by a slow, steady trickle of people all claiming to have played Logacta at a far higher level than I did.

The ‘Chart Soccer’ game, advertised in Shoot! magazine for many years, has a strangely addictive quality if you’re prepared to spend many an hour playing it. In short, competitions happen by randomly drawing teams and rolling special dice to determine match results. A cleverly formulated concept and a perfect pastime to while away dull weekends or unremarkable holidays.

Despite the mechanisms employed by Logacta to make its scores more realistic, the game essentially revolved around random number generation - and that set my memory racing. It suddenly dawned on me that around the age of 11 or 12, I went through something of a ‘random football’ apprenticeship.

It started when a few friends of mine and I created a game that would entertain us for an hour or so one dreary Sunday afternoon. It was essentially an FA Cup competition where we wrote the names of 32 Football League clubs on separate small pieces of card and then did the same with the numbers zero to five. The teams would go into one bag and the numbers would go into another.

Starting with the Fourth Round, we would draw out two teams to play each other, write the fixture down, then pull out a number for the home team score. Having written that number down, the number would go back into the bag, the numbers would be shaken up and another number would be drawn for the away team’s score (which was also written down). The whole process would be repeated for all the games in the round and every round in the competition until an outright winner was known, with repeat draws made if replays, extra time or penalties were needed.

Before you say so, yes, I know: there was plenty of potential for scorelines such as ‘Manchester United 0 Wrexham 4’, but at that age we allowed our imaginations to make an excuse for them. It was a ‘giant-killing result’, an instance of ‘the magic of the Cup’ weaving its magical spell on us.

Version 2 soon followed. Here, the number cards were replaced by result cards. This speeded up the whole process of completing a full tournament. Instead of drawing, say, a 1 and a 4, now you’d draw a ‘2-0’ or a ‘3-1’. It didn't make the scores any more realistic, but it was an example of my 11-year-old self seeing something unexciting and repetitive and figuring out how to reach a natural conclusion more quickly. (Saturday night TV schedulers in the UK - take note.)

Much later, version 3 finally arrived, and by then I’d not only worked out how to create more realistic results but also how to embrace the allure of European football. Unfortunately the improvements made in speeding everything up had to be abandoned, but I guess you can’t have everything.

I’d have been around 13 or 14 by the time this final version of the game came to light, but it was probably my best. I was now a regular buyer of World Soccer and could easily tell my Honveds from my Lech Poznans. The European Cup was now my tournament of choice, and for that I employed a deceptively simple, yet surprisingly accurate scoring system.

To begin with, all the matches for each round were drawn first. Once those had been written down, I then assessed each match and filled in a grid like this:

The way I did so was as follows. First of all, I had to think of a likely result that could actually happen if Liverpool ever played Sparta Prague - let’s say 2-0 to Liverpool (note: this would have been circa 1984). That result would have been entered in column 1 and column 7 as follows:

I would do the same for another likely result, this time entered in columns 2 and 6 and again for columns 3 and 5:

Finally, I’d think of one last unlikely, but still technically possible, result for column 4:

Having done that, I would then draw two numbers from a bag (which contained two sets from 1 to 7) and that would determine the final result. For instance, if I drew a 7 for Liverpool and a 2 for Sparta Prague, the final result would be 2-1 to Liverpool.

“Dear me”, I hear you cry - “What a long, drawn out (no pun intended) way of playing a fictional football tournament.” Well, yes, it was, but here’s the rub. Due to the fanatical way I used to absorb knowledge about European football teams and their current form back in the mid-80’s, I could more often than not determine the outcome of many real matches.

So let's say Celtic were due to play Athletic Bilbao. I’d be fairly satisfied that using the above method, I could tell you whether there would be a home win, an away win or a draw based on the data I entered into a grid like those shown in Version 3 above. Don’t ask me how - it just worked (most of the time).

Setting aside the fact that it would take an hour just to do the First Round (let alone the rest of the tournament), this turned out to be my crowning glory. Here was a game I could play alone or with friends, a game where my imagination and knowledge could be given free reign to combine with randomness to create an enjoyable fantasy world of football.

All of which begs the question: did you ever play random football with a pen and sheets of paper? If so, tell us all about it! Leave us a comment and share your childhood memories with us...

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Peter Pan Pocket Pop-o-matic Football Game, 1979

Back in the days when a 'handheld device' meant nothing more than a few bits of plastic in a cardboard box, there was the chance to play football on the move - wherever you happened to be. That is, of course, if you had either (a) a healthy imagination or (b) very low expectations.

Following not very hotly on the heels of Pocketeers 'World Cup' in 1975, Peter Pan Playthings, that maker of games such as 'Test Match' and 'Frustration', came up with their Pop-o-Matic Football Game. 'Pop-O-Matic', you'll remember, was that cunningly useful system designed to stop little kiddies losing their dice when playing board games. Never more was it needed than in a game that could conceivably have been played in the back of a car or in the school playground.

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Palitoy Pocketeers 'World Cup' (1975)

Think of the phrase 'Flick-to-kick' and you're immediately likely to summon up images of the hemispherically-anchored figures of Subbuteo. The trouble is, Subbuteo was never very good as a game to play in the back of a car on a long journey.

Luckily, there was one game worthy of the slogan. Kind of. 'World Cup' was one of a whole range of games by Palitoy called 'Pocketeers'. Their aim was to provide fun entertainment that kids could easily buy with whatever pocket money they had. There were no batteries to fit and no computer gadgetry involved; all the moving parts in each game were built around clockwork mechanisms and manual interaction on the part of the owner, and that was all.

There were many games to collect in the series emulating everything from angling to motor racing, and all of them fitted snugly in an average school child's pocket. Inevitably football came into focus for the Palitoy boffins and in 1975 they came up with a design that simulated the end-to-end cut and thrust of the beautiful game... in plastic.

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Logacta (1976)

If you happen to find yourself thumbing through some 35-year-old copies of Shoot! magazine, it’s quite possible your eye will be caught by a small advert somewhere near the back for ‘Logacta.’

Subtitled ‘Chart Soccer’, it mysteriously offered the chance to organise league, cup and international competitions with “all the suspense and excitement of the full football season.” Several years ago, my eye was caught in just such a way. What was this game? How was it played? Why was it never sold in shops along with other football games? I searched the internet for information, and ultimately eBay provided me with the answers.

In its original form, Logacta was sold as a small white box containing numerous printed grids and instructions, cards and seven dice with different coloured numbers on. What I found on an eBay auction several years ago was someone selling all the original printed materials scanned in and saved as JPEG files onto a recordable CD along with a description of how each of the die were configured. In essence, this was a do-it-yourself version of Logacta but no less intriguing to my curious mind.

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Kick-Off (1981)

It's our absolute delight to welcome back Al Gordon from God, Charlton and Punk Rock who provides us with another excellent guest post - this time on the simple pleasure of playing a classic football board game...

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of people on a Sunday morning. Those who like their bed, and those who would rather endure the wind and the rain to rummage through boxes of other people’s cast-offs at a boot sale.

I’m firmly planted in the former category whilst my wife will gladly come home clutching an armful of early bird ‘bargains’ which miraculously we have previously survived without.

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Videoblog 2: Kick-Off (MB Games)

Chris O returns with the second Football Attic Videoblog, this time taking MB's Kick-Off as its subject.

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Penny Football

The great thing about football is that it can be played in so many different forms. Purists will always enjoy the traditional approach of physically kicking a ball around while the more technologically-minded among us might prefer moving computerised competitors around on a TV screen. For a truly pared-down version of the game, however, nothing appeals quite like Penny Football.

I’d be lying if I said it was the most portable version of football around as, strictly speaking, you need a decent sized table to play it on. Apart from that, though, all you need are three coins (preferably of a single denomination) and two players. It’s also easy to play – you simply shuffle one coin between the other two with your finger, moving from one end of the table to the other until you score a goal.

Think of it like Subbuteo without the players. Or the floodlights. Or anything else, for that matter. Penny Football is simply a game of skill where the ability to control the slide of a coin is virtually everything. I played it a lot when I was 13-years-old or so, usually during wet break-times at school when I was holed up in a soulless classroom looking for a way to kill time. It’s fiendishly addictive and anyone can play it, so long as they have two fully functioning hands.

Like any simple game, you’ll find variations here and there offering different interpretations of the spartan rules. When I played it at school, my friends and I developed a set way to shoot at goal. This involved laying your hands flat on the table with both thumbs and index fingers touching. The ‘ball’ coin was then placed on its edge between the thumbs, at which point an upward push would propel it goalwards.

And then there’s the goalmouth itself. The Wikipedia page on Penny Football suggests the opposing goalmouth be made by splaying the index finger and little finger on the table surface. We had a different approach. We’d make the shape of a goal frame by pointing our index fingers downwards (touching the table) with our thumbs touching, and much better we thought it was too.

I will admit we were playing our own specific version of the game, but therein you have the versatility of the thing. If you’re not happy playing the rudimentary form, you can embellish it here and there with your own personal adjustments. Some people, for example, make use of a fourth coin to act as a goalkeeper when the attacking player tries to shuffle their shot in. The range of ‘improvements’ you can make are endless.



And as if to prove that there’s nothing new under the sun, a computer game version duly arrived in time for Euro 2008 thanks to JVC. As one of the corporate sponsors, they chose Euroball as their way of getting fans to play football online with a beautifully designed and executed take on the old Penny Football game.

JVC's EuroBall game: Great gameplay, nice graphics

So there it is: three coins, a table and a whole lot of fun. Penny Football – simple, but super to play.

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Super Top Trumps: European Club Football

Good ideas never die, it seems - they just wait for nostalgia to catch up with them. That would appear to be the case with Top Trumps, the vintage card game that was once a staple for children in school playgrounds everywhere during the late-1970’s. By the time the 1990’s had arrived, Top Trumps was largely a forgotten phenomenon, but Waddingtons relaunched it with a new range of ‘Super Top Trumps’ aimed at distracting kids from their Nintendo Gameboys and Sega Game Gears.

It was 1992 and Waddingtons, the Leeds-based manufacturer of board games such as Monopoly, Cluedo and Sorry! released a second set of card decks to appeal to an even wider range of children. Presuming ‘Racing Trucks’ and ‘Dinosaurs’ weren’t to your liking, ‘European Club Football’ probably stood a fair chance of being an imminent purchase, but unlike previous decks of football Top Trumps, this one featured teams as their subject rather than players.

And what could possibly be wrong with that, you might ask? At first glance, nothing – in fact there were now eight categories on each card to choose from rather than the five previously as seen back in the late-70's. As we discussed previously, the old 'player' sets had categories such as 'League Appearances' and 'International Goals' as the criteria by which you'd win a hand in each game. Here, the categories were mostly club competitions. These included 'League Champions', 'Domestic Cups (FA)', European Champions' and so on, but here's where it became a victim of its own ingenuity.

Some categories, such as 'League Champions' had a wide range of values from Rangers' 42 down to Chelsea's 1. This made winning a hand nice and clear cut, but had you plumped for 'European Super Cup' or 'UEFA Cup', the team on your card would have a number no higher than 2 or 3. This would have meant a lot of tied rounds which certainly allowed the kitty to build up nicely, but only until the inevitable switch back to 'League Champions' again or the novelty category of 'Year of Formation'.

Anyway, perhaps this was only a side issue for the real joy of this Top Trumps set was seeing which teams were included as part of the game. Naturally enough, English teams were the best represented in the 30-card pack - 11 to be precise - and of those, some were rather dubious selections. Newcastle United were still in the second tier back in 1992 and had only won a single European trophy (the 1969 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup), but there they were, proudly represented by the still slim image of Micky Quinn.

Panathinaikos and Marseille seem to have been included purely on account of their domestic success having not won any European trophies between them while Borussia Mönchengladbach were relying solely on their two UEFA Cup wins, the last of which had happened in 1979.

Still, for every Panathinaikos there was a Real Madrid or a Juventus, and it was great to see their pictures on each of the cards. Mind you, some of the pictures were a little... well... odd. Some were the wrong shape and didn't fill the space provided (Bayern Munich, Feyenoord, AC Milan, etc) while one or two had quirky compositions (Man City's photo taken 50 feet away from the action, Tottenham's featuring three players of which two had their backs turned to camera).

All very nice, but two question remain unanswered: why 'Super' Top Trumps and why the index numbers in the top-left corner of each card? Simple: there was a second way to play the game. In essence, all the cards were dealt out to all players and everyone had to complete all their sets (i.e. they had to collect 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D and 1E, and so on). Each player would ask another player "Have you got 3C?" and if they did, they'd collect the card and get another turn. If not, they didn't. The first one to complete all their sets was the winner.

So there it is - Waddington's attempt to breathe new life into an old classic. It wasn't perfect, but it had plenty of interest for football-loving kids everywhere... until they wanted to play on their Gameboy again, at least.

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Soccerboss / Goal! / Wembley ad, 1969

We wonder what the 'scientific approach' was that was used in 'Goal'? Anyone got any thoughts?

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Top Trumps: British Soccer Stars (1978/79)

Whenever anyone does a survey of the best children’s toys and games of all time, it’s always the same names that get mentioned – Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Castrate The Racist… well maybe not the last one, but you get the picture. No-one, however, stops to consider Top Trumps – surely the only card game that ever really attained ‘legend’ status among school children up and down the UK.

Before we get onto the specifics of the British Soccer Stars pack, it’s only right to consider what Top Trumps is all about and why it’s still held in such high regard to this day. Top Trumps is a brilliantly simple game for two or more people where each player is dealt an equal number of cards from a pack. The object of the game is to win all the cards from your opponents, and to do this players take turns to read out a statistic from their card in the hope that it’s ‘stronger’ than the equivalent one on their opponents’ cards. If it is, they win the cards for that round.

From the late 1970’s many packs started appearing in the shops and all of them were cheap enough for kids to buy with their meagre pocket money. All manner of subjects were covered from Dragsters to Military Aircraft but it was the football packs that allowed the average schoolboy (or girl) to indulge in their hunger for knowledge.

And so it was that the first of those football packs, Dubrecq’s British Soccer Stars, arrived on the scene in 1978 to brighten up the dullest of school breaktimes. The set contained 32 cards featuring the great and the not-so-great of English league football, classified across the five categories of International Appearances, International Goals, League Appearances, League Goals and Height.

It’s at this point one has to stop and wonder what the modern-day sets of football Top Trumps must be like in this era of Opta Stats and the media’s clinical dependency on significant data of any kind. To be honest, we’ve not looked at the current sets because they don’t enter our realm of nostalgia, but we wouldn’t mind betting that they probably have categories like ‘Kilometres run’ and ‘Passes completed.’ Such is the price to pay for progress, we suppose.

On the subject of height, you’d be more than happy if you were dealt a goalkeeper or two during a game, although in this set it was no guarantee of success. At 5’ 11½” Liverpool’s Ray Clemence seemed a dead cert to win you a hand, but you’d have overlooked Phil Thompson, Glen Hoddle (sic) or Paul Mariner at your peril. They were a full 6-feet tall, as was the other goalkeeper in the pack, Peter Shilton. Champion Top Trumpers take note.

The thing is, goalies were a complete liability in Top Trumps if it wasn’t your turn to call a category. If the lead player shouted out ‘International goals’ or ‘League goals’, you were instantly onto a hiding and by 1978 neither Shilton or Clemence had racked up that many International Appearances either.

In fact 1978 provided an interesting snapshot of the 'Old Guard' in the prime of their careers and a new wave of players starting to emerge. When it came to International Appearances, one of the worst cards to own was that of the aforementioned Glenn Hoddle. Still in his early-20’s, he didn’t make his England debut until 1979, so you could be sure one of your opponents would get the dubious honour of owning that card. Emlyn Hughes, on the other hand, reached the peak of his international career around the time this pack came out and was the best in that category with 49.

Hughes was also a big hitter in the League Appearances category along with Manchester United’s Martin Buchan. Once again however, Glenn Hoddle was the player to avoid with only 62 appearances to boast, compared to Buchan and Hughes who had more than four times that amount.

But such talk of statistical one-upmanship only accounted for part of the game’s appeal. Aside from all the facts and figures was the visual charm which, being the late-1970’s, could be summed up in one word: 'rudimentary'.

Yes, each card had a colour picture of each of the players and yes, each one had a circular inset showing a close-up of the player’s face, but it has to be said that the photography did at best leave a little to be desired. The wide shot of Ray Clemence, for example, is unflattering in its portrayal of the England goalkeeper’s obscured face in the main picture. Phil Thompson’s face can barely be seen at all (something he’s more than made up for by becoming a regular on Sky’s Soccer Saturday) while Mick Mills looks like the only player practicing keepy uppies at his local training pitch. As for those circular insets, we can only assume Ray Kennedy wasn’t given the stool to stand on that he’d asked for.

To be honest, we’re also at a bit of a loss to understand why some players had even been selected for this collection. Fine – pick Stanley Bowles, Ray ‘Butch’ Wilkins and Andy Gray if you must, but Peter Ward of Brighton? Clive Woods of Ipswich? Are these the actions of a true football fan or an agent keen to see get his client some much needed exposure?

We’ll probably never know and that’s no doubt for the best. We wouldn’t have asked such questions when we were nine years old and we shouldn’t ask them now. This was the game that captured the imagination of millions of young football fans and in updated form continues to do so today. Quirky and lo-tech, you can’t help but love it and long may it continue.

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