LogFAQs > #985811434

#09 - Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/428717/huddle-the-fantasy-football-game

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So I will preface this but saying I'm not a big sports guy. I've done fantasy football in the past but I don't really enjoy watching sports but didn't mind the stats perspective of it. On my first day at the con while I was walking around checking out the exhibitor area and the demo area (they are right next to each other if I didn't mention this earlier. They put up a wall when the exhibitor area is closed though) I saw this game being demo'd. I though my friends would probably be interested so we went back and tried it out on the third day after they were both there.

The guy demoing it was real chill and went over it and talked a bit about their company. He was the marketing guy who was friends with the developers of the game and was heavily involved which was cool. I don't know if this game is officially out yet, but I believe it's either out real soon or already out.

So onto the game itself. This game is meant to mimic fantasy football of both the draft aspect and the week to week aspect. You determine how long your season is going to be (we did 3 weeks then a finals) and that determines the game length. I think it took us between 30-45 minutes so it's not super long, and I actually think it probably works better with shorter season, probably 3 to maybe 6 weeks at most.

So the first part of the game (and imo the best) is the draft. This game is loosely based off an auction draft but works somewhat differently. You have 9 positions to fill and a certain amount of money for the draft. (I believe its 20 but it might have been 25). You need to fill every position so his recommendation was to put a coin on each position so you didn't accidentally overspend and be stuck. The positions are QB, RB, WR, TE, Flex (RB/WR/TE), K, D/ST and 2 Bench slots. Each card (you are drafting player cards) has a position, a team, a player name and a star rating. The star ratings range from 1-5, with different ranges for each position (kickers cap at 3 for example).

At the start of the draft one person for each position gets flipped. Drafting works in rounds, in each round you must bid at least once, even if you get outbid. There is a minute put on the clock and the draft is realtime. If you want to bid on someone you just have to put your chips there (the chips are colored to each player). So if you are the first to bid on someone you have to put at least 1 chip, next one to bid has to put at least one more than you. There's no order or turns, its a free for all. So what would usually happen is you would immediately see bids on the high star players (for their role, a 3* kicked is still a high star player), then some bids would trickle in for most of the minute and someone may try to snipe a player at the end.

After bidding ends, you go one by one for each player and give it to whoever bid the most and put their chips in the bank, everyone else would get there money back. After everything is resolved you then flip over new players for each position that was bought (the ones that were not bought stay) and begin the next round. You do this until everyone has filled their entire roster.

So there is a surprising amount of depth in the drafting system. Do you want to go big for high star players early or hold back and give more flexibility. Since you have to bid at least once each round getting too many players early could mean you are the first one forced to take that undesirable 2 star TE that has been there the whole time, potentially opening up better options for others. You can also try to sneak in an early low bid on someone you know someone is going to outbid you on to effectively stall. The other thing to note about drafting is that teams matter a little bit. If you have two or more players from a team you get what is effectively a one star bonus to one of the two players (even if one of those players is on the bench). This means a one star kicked may be useless to everyone else but can upgrade your 5* QB to effectively a 6*, even if you just keep the kicker on the bench, adding another layer of strategy here.

So after the draft is the normal season. You carry over any unspent money from the draft, and then get 1 more money for each week in the season (so 3 money for a 3 week season). You also discard all of the unbought players. Each week then starts with a global event and player events. The global event is something that effects everyone, it could be something like teams x and y are on bye so you can't use them this week, or team z gets a bonus this week. We only did a few of these so I'm not sure all of the options but they usually effect some players but not all. Each player also gets their own player event card which typically was something like "this position gets +1 dice this week" or "this position gets -1 dice this week", usually small effects.

The final part of the pre-week is the waiver wire/moving players around. You flip over a new player for each position and people can now bid on them again, similar to during the draft (but only 1 round). This gives players another chance to replace anyone they have on bye (if they don't have someone on their bench that they can move around) and to just generally improve their team. If you buy someone you have to move someone to the free agent pool which anyone is free to take from. People are also free to just rearrange their players as desired. You can also trade if desired.

After everyone has there team set you then get to the weeks game. You pair up with an opponent (we played with 4, it plays up to 6 with one box but you always want an even number. I think you can do 12 with 2 boxes as well). You then compete with probably the weakest part of the game. You roll dice position by position (bench doesn't count). You get one dice for each star of the player, plus any modifiers, including the team bonus (only 1 player on the team gets the bonus, but the other player can be benched). After you've rolled all the players you add up each teams total and the highest score wins.