Strat-O-Matic Football

Strat-O-Matic Football is a tabletop board game published by the Strat-O-Matic game company beginning in 1968 that simulates American football using dice and individually rated player cards. Each real athlete represented in the game has his own card, printed with ratings drawn from his actual on field performance, and those ratings are cross referenced against result tables to resolve the outcome of every play. A participant manages a team much as a real coach would, calling running and passing plays, choosing personnel, and making in game decisions, while the dice and the cards' printed ratings determine how each play actually unfolds. A complete game of Strat-O-Matic Pro Football takes roughly sixty minutes to play, a pace that let the game build a dedicated following among fans who wanted a statistically grounded way to refight real seasons or invent hypothetical matchups between teams and eras that could never meet on an actual field. The game's reliance on individually researched player ratings, rather than generic position averages, is the feature most identified with the wider Strat-O-Matic line across the different sports it covers.