Since I focus so much on baseball and racing games, other sports sims that I’ve picked up over the years have gone ignored.

Today I decided to try a soccer sim, The Beautiful Game by Lambourne Games.

It truly is a beautiful game.

You read of a couple of ratings to form a ‘match deck’ of playing cards, then go through them using a pair of d, with certain rolls of one die representing a scoring chance, and then you go to another pile of cards to determine what’s happening on the pitch, which is resolved with another roll of 2d6.

A basic (layer 1) game with those rules resulted in a 1-1 draw between Tottenham Hotspur vs. Arsenal (2012-13).  The game took maybe 5 minutes or so.

I then tried a layer 2 game, which includes a ‘timing’ deck that specifies when a goal occurs, and a d10+d6 method to determine the goal scorer.

The second match unfolded as follows:

6′ TOT – Poldolski – own goal
15′ TOT – Bale
19′ ARS – Gervinho
HT: TOT 2-1 ARS
53′ TOT – Dembele
66′ ARS – Poldolski
90+4′ ARS – Rosicky
90+9′ TOT – Bale
FT: TOT 4-3 ARS

This took less than 10 minutes to roll.

There’s a site with lots of free seasons, so I downloaded a couple of American soccer leagues from 1967, along with the 1975 NASL season with the New York Cosmos and a rookie named Pele.

We’ll see if I ever get around to starting a soccer replay.

Stay tuned!