All Kinds of Fun!
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.
Sycarion Diversions is a sister site of pinakidion.*. pinakidion.* deals more with religious and writing topics. This site houses information on games. Specifically, this has information on card games, board games, and role-playing games. Card games and board games are a collaborative effort with my friend Jeff. Jeff has created and briefly marketed one board game and has idea for lots of others. Role-Playing Games are my bailiwick. I've been playing since I was 10 starting with the Mentzer Basic D&D box. I stopped playing in college, but recently renewed my love for RPGs. In 2005, I discovered the Action! System from Goldrush Games. Since then, I have also found Microlite20 and OpenD6. It's a good time to game.
For what it is worth, feel free to use anything that you see on the site. It is not copyrighted or even placed under a Creative Commons License. Part of the reason for this is that rules for games cannot really be copyrighted. However, the main reason is that the value of this site is the community I am a part of. Restrictions on ideas and games can delay innovation, even simple restrictions can be an impediment. Sure, I'd like a link and to be given credit, but that's up to the person.
The rest of the story can be found here.