Avalon Hill produced statistics based versions of the major sports. Baseball was the most enjoyable, especially because the rules for making your own players were included. The big, index-card-sized FAC cards that determined what happened were chock full of encoded information for any situation.

And then there was the dreaded, “Z”.

Some of the same things carried over to the football game, which I dearly loved, too. The one thing I did not like, though, was that it was almost impossible to figure out how to add your own players. This became a bigger issue when updated player rosters ended in 1991.

A few hobby sites have some ideas on card creation, but none of them seem compatible with original card sets. In other words, using their rules on the 1991 teams would not create something close to the ‘official’ cards from Avalon Hill. Not even close in some cases.

So I decided to attempt to reverse engineer a set of 1991 official cards. Turns out that almost every card is arbitrary in some way. Two statistically identical players can have different results. Art Monk’s card is wrong and only they know how they came up with Andre Rison’s card.

So, I’m in mid-process of refining a consistent and universal set of rules to generate cards. This, of course, will mean refactoring official sets. With all the football stats around, that’s not too hard.

More later.