At some point over the last few decades I have picked up copies of various football-themed board and desktop games. The ones I remember most from my own childhood are Subbuteo (of course) and Waddington's Table Soccer for flicking a ball (or counter) around, and Wembley, Soccerama and Soccerboss for the management games with piles of money and various dice. It was in such times when my own mathematical understanding of chance and probability began to develop. Very useful in a pandemic, let me tell you. Hey, kids, this is the kind of things we did before computers and when it was too dark or wet to be kicking a ball about for real on the local 'rec.
Emlyn Hughes' Team Tactix dates from 1986. My copy looks to be unused, although I must have acquired it much later, probably via eBay or a car boot sale. At this date, Emlyn's distinguished playing career (principally with Liverpool and England) was over and he was coming to the end of his tenure as a team captain on BBC's A Question of Sport. I have no idea of the sums that would have been needed in that era to secure his endorsement for this product. For younger readers, he was part of a dominant Liverpool side of the 1970s and a multiple winner of the European Cup. If you were born in the late 60s, you might know him best for a particular episode of QoS where Princess Anne was on his team and he struggled somewhat to maintain conventional boundaries of protocol and decorum in the presence of a royal guest.
The object of the game is to collect a team, of the most value, in a playing time of 90 minutes. The rules state that a player can continue with his or her turn as soon as the spinner become available, without waiting for the previous player to decide whether to buy, sell or whatever. That sounds a bit chaotic, especially with auctions going on, but I can't speak from experience. The tactix of the title are therefore completely unrelated to tactics in any footballing sense. Your grandad could probably have wiped you out with his lifetime grasp of whist and rummy card games, whereas your precocious ten-year old understanding of catenaccio and Total Football would have done you no good at all.
The board itself is in the standard Monopoly format, with pieces moving around the edge. This impression is heightened by a pile of cards which trigger random events, usually with the loss or gain of a sum of money. It was produced to a decent durable standard but I haven't been able to find any sales figures.
The cards have photographs of the well-known players of that era. The clubs chosen are the most-supported at that time, I believe, and include a handful from Scotland. You'd need to be at the very least in your 40s now to recall most of them. It's unlikely that we will ever see another product of this type, but you will pick one of these up easily enough from eBay for somewhere in the region of £10-£15. The individual player cards are also listed separately as possible collectors' items. The four Scottish teams featured are Aberdeen and Dundee United in addition to Celtic and Rangers.
Emlyn himself would go on to be the endorsing name for one of the early home computer football simulations, Emlyn Hughes' International Soccer, which did quite well in the era of Atari ST, Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum machines.
Thanks for your interest.
Links to previous football game posts on this blog:
No comments:
Post a Comment