Anyone play cards-and-dice sports simulator games?
Curious to see if there are any other sports sim fans around here. If you're not familiar with the genre, the two most popular and longest running are APBA Baseball/Football/Hockey and Strat-O-Matic Baseball/Football/Hockey. Personally, I'm a big fan of Second Season Football and I'm playing with Back to Minnesota's 1965 season so I can bring Jim Brown and Cleveland back to glory!
If you've never heard of this before, think of these games as "story generators" where you can play two teams against each other and see how close the dice rolls and stats get to real life. I play as a sort of chill night where I listen to a baseball game or a podcast with a cup of coffee. Throwing dice around and watching Jim Brown plow through some poor defense is really enjoyable :)
You can also play head to head with another player! I highly recommend a smaller game like Pocket Pennant Run if you're interested in diving into games like this. A similar game would be Stone Cold Hockey for hockey fans and Fast Drive Football for football nerds like myself.
The biggest communities online are definitely the Delphi Forums for Tabletop Sports as well as the Digital to Dice Podcast Facebook page.
Digital versions of the APBA and Strat games exist, and there is a huge fanbase for the Action! PC Games, and a hugely popular game is Out of the Park Baseball which has simulator-like features but is mostly a baseball management game.
I had no idea that this was a genre of tabletop game, I can see myself getting way too into games like this.
When I was a kid, I invented a rudimentary game with hockey cards. You'd make a roster of 12 forwards, 6 defencemen, and 2 goalies with your cards. Faceoffs were decided with a dice roll. The winning team got the puck and could try to score.
Scoring chances were handled by having a forward roll a d20 against the goalie's d20 roll. Players got bonuses to their scoring and saving chances based on their real-life stats. Forwards could assist with scoring to add to the shooter's bonus and defencemen could assist their goalie. If you missed a goal, the other team got the puck and could try to score.
After every goal, you had to switch out your players for the next faceoff. I think a full game was 12 hands so you played all of your forwards 3 times each, defence 4 times, and goalies 6 times.
I didn't have many friends who were both into hockey and tabletop games, so I mostly played solo. Eventually when Magic: The Gathering came out, I abandoned my game and started spending all of my time and money on pieces of cardboard with pictures of dragons and elves instead of hockey players.