Thoughts on my unpublished, futuristic gridiron football game

Hi everyone! This is my first post on this site and my first public post about my game I have been working on for a bit now. I wanted to make a game journal but I can't for the life of me understand how that works, so I think writing blog posts will be good.

So quick pitch about my game:

IFL: The Game (tentative title) is a futuristic gridiron football game that pits two players head to head as the quarterback/coach of their respective teams in a battle of tactical thinking with each side selecting a playbook card and the result of the play is determined by dice rolls. The dice rolls can be modified by which player you choose to throw the ball to, run the ball with, and/or special items you can purchase to affect the outcomes of the play.

The initial inspiration for this game is Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES. To me that distilled football into it's most basic interesting choice. Choosing plays that you think the defender won't be in position to catch the player with the ball. The defense doesn't have a playbook like the Madden series in this game. The offense's playbook is on screen for everyone to see. The offense selects a play that they feel will catch the defense off guard, and the defense tries to select the play the offense has chosen. By selecting the same play or the same type like Pass or Run, the outcome of the play is more likely to go in the defense's favor, but that's not always so, such as in real football. I really liked this style of choosing plays, because most games you have to draw from a deck of cards for your playbook choice or lookup on charts. While the chart lookup is more thematic, I feel it's too slow for the kind of game I was making. Drawing random cards to determine play choices kills the theme for me because the coach and the players know all the plays. They don't forget certain plays at certain times, so they should be able to pick any play they want at any time.

So this is where I started. I literally just copied a bunch of plays from Tecmo Bowl, made playbooks for the Bears and the Vikings and played it with my wife. Each team's playbook has two copies of 10 cards, one for offense and one for the defense. This is to get the feel for Tecmo Bowl. Both sides know what the plays are. You can see my first two slapped together designs for the cards in the attached images.

Then I added dice and whomever had more successes (4s, 5s, and 6s) was the winner of the play. Ties went to the defender. If you were successful on offense you would roll some dice to determine yardage. Defense if you rolled any 6s and won the play, you would roll a die for each 6 to send them back yards.

So that was the core of the game and still is but I have since first prototype, there wasn't much of a reason to choose a pass or run over the other, other than hoping it's not what the defense picked.

I also had a flicking mechanic for the punts and field goals where the field goals you had to flick in a cup. I chose this because flicking through a field goal in a short board is pretty easy. I didn't want the game to be a flicking contest, I just wanted players to have that available to them when needed, so flicking into a cup was much harder but not impossible and still fun.

The very first play was somewhat fun even though it lacked so many things, some stated above. Testing out that inspiration quickly was one of the best decisions I have made designing this game. I have made many bad decisions and wrong turns as I will explain in future posts. I will also explain why I made it space themed, and it wasn't really for a selling standpoint. I had gameplay reasons I will go into, but this first prototype was just set in the present day.

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask me questions on anything. I will happy to answer and post more images of my early prototype. I'm on like 6 or 7 now, not sure.