Fantalk

Jack of Shadows · Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 1:57 am Post subject: Football board games

This is I guess for...shall we say...the slightly older viewer. Smile

My son has taken to playing board games and I was describing a couple of football related games from my youth. I wonder if anyone remembers and what they think of them

The first is pretty well known - Wembley (or originally The Road To Wembley) and had been around from the 1950s, although the version I owned would have been an early '70s one. This was a straight forward KO with teams from each of the four divisions of the English League. Advantage for division and home over away was accounted for by the use of coloured dice. I remember there was cash involved, but not a lot else. I believe there was a weirder second edition that had star strikers, but I've never seen this one.

The second game is pretty much a vague memory and the people that I've spoken to about it have no recollection of the game at all. The game was set in the English League, consisting of four divisions. Each division consisted of two coloumns of squares each numbered to correspond to the position your team occupied in the table.

The team moved up the column (division) by winning matches. I presume using dice to simulate match scores in a similar fashion to Wembley. Once you reached the top of the division you were promoted to the bottom of the next column. Once you reached the top of the Division One column you got to play in Europe by advancing across the board instead of going up or down.

These were great games and a lot less taxing on the mind than FM, PES or any of the other computer based packages of today.

Of course there was Subbuteo, which to my surprise is thriving even if it is no longer mainstream. I've even come across Waddington's Table Soccer, which I'm sure had a white tiddly wink as the ball and the plastic players had tiddly wink like bases to ping the 'ball' goal wards on a stripey, green cardboard pitch. Naturally players were severly injured during these matches as they were knelt on because the games were usually played at low altitude!! Laughing

I had all these games and more. I wonder what happened to them. Anyway, please forgive the ramblings of a bloke who is still up at a ridiculous hour, but would really like to hear from other tragic football board gamers from the past. Smile

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Neebur · Joined: 20 Jul 2008 Posts: 1225

Quality rambling Jack,remember these games

The Wembley game was around in the 50s,60s and 70s

Alan Russell · Joined: 12 Jul 2008 Posts: 1090 Location: Kirkcaldy

You'll no doubt find this interesting:

http://www.wsc.co.uk/content/view/2204/29/
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Jack of Shadows · Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 6:22 pm Post subject:

Thanks guys - it was Soccerama.

I took the name and just followed the link from WSC and there were pictures of the game. Happy memories.

Pity the games have gone missing as it would have been great to take on my laddie.

Mind you he'd probably beat me at those games as well!! Very Happy

Edit:

I was looking at the pictures of Soccerama and one of the penalty cards shown was directors found guilty of illegal payments, fined £2,500.

The bastion of football wasn't exactly lillywhite clean then! Laughing

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