Premier Table Soccer (TAF 424)

As ever, thanks for your interest in this latest nostalgia post on football board games – as it turns out, it’s the 600^th post on the Modus Hopper Random blog. MHR is a blog which has never taken itself too seriously, and has now stuttered its way through a unique mixture of serious comments, tongue-in-cheek observations, random and randomish decision-making  and records of some big sporting moments. You are never far away from a pun, and of course there has been the widely-ignored #keepertopcolourstats in the most recent seasons. The blog has a small but loyal readership and it may well be around for a few more years. If you’ve been with me from the start, you might not appreciate being reminded that we go back to September 2010. Sixteen years of blurb. Time flies when you are having fun. But now ... Premier Table Soccer.

My copy of Premier Table Soccer 2000 comes from WP Sports Games of Guernsey, is dated 1998, and is endorsed by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA). The inventor credit is given to Tom Waterman, and it is clear that a lot of thought and planning went into this as a competitor for Subbuteo. I’m not sure, judging from the persistence of the latter in social media, that it quite succeeded in that, but it is an excellent product nonetheless.

I first came across this game in my own childhood as “TAF 424”, the name coming from the formation that was all the rage at the time. There are undoubted similarities to Subbuteo. Firstly, the green baize cloth pitch always behaved worse than 1975 Baseball Ground, Derby if you didn’t have it pinned on a baseboard. Secondly, the game hinges on a pass-and-move model. However, the comparison is only true up to a point. This product included a training video. There is a lot going on in the lengthy rule book – some would say a lot of scope for disputes – but there is no doubt that if played within the rules at a reasonable pace this would be a very satisfying player experience. I suspect that families devised their own local rules in the end.

In Subbuteo, lifting the ball would always be an issue – remember the springy throwers and the green plastic ramps for corners? – whereas PTS allowed a certain type of flicking upwards. It’s also much more realistic than Waddington’s Table Soccer of the same era, which amounted to a specialised form of tiddleywinks.

Anyway, back to my set, shortly heading to my grandson for Christmas (don’t tell him!). It’s beautifully produced to a high standard. I seem to have acquired an England-ish vs Brazil-ish setup, with a couple of black faces on the former as Anderson, Regis and Cunningham had opened that door of opportunity by this time.

The game mechanics involve pushing the ball with the flat face on the base in order to pass along the ground, or flicking it with the sloping face to get height. The orientation of the player base is as important as the position, allowing you to play a wall pass (or one-two if you like) to get the ball around an opponent. There is one six-sided die which determines whether an attempted tackle is successful. This is not a game where you could open the box and be playing against your little brother or sister in ten minutes - there's a lot of detail to work through in the explanatory booklet, and of course the video too.

The game pre-dates search engine optimisation so there is a bit more to be found if you search on the original TAF424 name. It was possible to get individual players made, presumably as a special order, and there are some images around of a PTS version of Wales’ Terry Hennessey complete with combover hairstyle.

I’ve included a full set of images of the rule book at the end of the post.

Thanks for your interest in this series, there will be a few more to come during the season.

Links to previous football game posts on this blog:

Wembley

Soccerama

Soccerboss

Emlyn Hughes’ Team Tactix

Penalty!

Kevin Keegan’s Matchday

The Manager (Terry Venables)

Roy of the Rovers

League Championship

Rule book images :

 

 

 

 

 

Board or Bored Game, You Decide

Here’s the latest in my series of posts on traditional board games with a football theme. My copy of League Championship, which I have picked up at some point from eBay or a car boot sale, is somewhat battered, and the trophy is missing. So a photocredit here goes to the boardgamegeek.com website for an image of what I am missing! It must date from the early 1970s.

 

In all honesty it’s hard to get excited about this one. For those of us of a certain age, the most interesting thing is the image of the football on the reverse of the circular playing board. In my part of the world (the Black Country) these were known as “caseballs” or “caseys” for some reason, as opposed to the moulded plastic lightweight alternatives.

I understand that in the very latest editions of the game, the ball image became the one with the black-and-white regular pentagons. There was also a special edition from 1974 labelled with Leeds United who were First Division champions. This seems to be identical in all respects other than the free Leeds United team poster inside the box.

The company producing this game is Sportslink Limited, who seem to have long since gone. The endorsements are from Gordon Banks (Stoke City and England goalkeeper for any youngsters reading this) and George Best (Manchester United and Northern Ireland). These two would have been icons of the game at that time, although Banks was on the verge of retirement following an eye injury sustained in a car accident. They are clearly recognisable among the otherwise generic images on the front of the box, and their autographs appear on the edge of the box lid.

As for the game … put your footballer figure (they are all plain white, presumably so you could paint them) and your token in the right place on the board, and take it in turns to roll a die, move your pieces, take cards, obey the instructions, work out who won the “match” and move your pieces again. Standard stuff, and hard to see where any skill or judgement is needed. At first glance, this game seems to be in the same category as ludo or snakes and ladders. As the game progresses, your pieces converge on the trophy in the centre of the board.

The only other thing worthy of comment is that one player (on the basis of dice rolls) is appointed as referee, and gets a little black book of rules.

There are a few copies on eBay for optimistic prices, as ever with these things, and the Leeds United one seems to be more valuable. I can't imagine George Best ever choosing to play a game of League Championship on a Saturday evening instead of the alternatives that were available to him in his heyday. Allegedly. Actually, to be fair, by his own admission I think.

Thanks for your interest in this series, there will be a few more to come during the season.

Links to previous football game posts on this blog:

Wembley

Soccerama

Soccerboss

Emlyn Hughes’ Team Tactix

Penalty!

Kevin Keegan’s Matchday

The Manager (Terry Venables)

Roy of the Rovers

 

Roy of the Rovers on the Board

My copy of this Roy of the Rovers board game is dated 1990. It's produced by Triotoys and Paradigm Games of Basingstoke, under licence from Fleetway publications who produced the comics and annuals of the same name. I wasn't a regular reader of the comic during my own childhood, but I gather that the dedicated comic started up in 1976 and continued until 1995. The character of Roy Race and the Melchester Rovers team go back to the 1950s when they first appeared in the Tiger comic. The dramatic storylines of the comic strip have not transferred to the board game. Every so often there have been relaunches or re-workings of the material and characters, including one where Roy is a manager and his son Rocky is on the pitch. It looks as if a video games company, Rebellion, have at least some of the rights now and there is a website and, of course, merchandise.

Meanwhile, back to my board game. It's a bit battered, but it looks unused and after this post is published it will be on the way to a charity shop. I suspect I picked it up either from eBay or a car boot sale. Indeed there are still some around on eBay, pitched as collectors' items and some with very optimistic asking prices. "For 2-6 Players Aged 5-105", it says.

Like some of the other games in my series of nostalgia boardgame posts - see below for links to the others - it dates from a time before games consoles and personal computers. Having scanned the rules, I would say this one has a lowish ratio of skill to luck in determining the outcome. I would also guess that with two players it would be rather dreary with all the temptations of dubious practices, within the rules, as we may be allegedly seeing in the real world in this era of multi-club ownership.

The board is a jigsaw type. The Bank of Melchester only deals in multiples of £250,000. The stand-up playing pieces are the best feature of the box contents. The game mechanics are familiar. Collect the right combination of players, but some of them are worth more than others. Collect gate receipts. There is one square on the board, "Sacked", which could have led to some interesting confrontations with family and friends. Land on that, and any one of the other players can swop their players with yours. I wonder how many friendships were ended over that.

I should also mention the six teams - you will manage one of the following: Touring Real, Sporting Perez, Dynamo Celtic, San Sebastian, Bayern Dortmund or, of course, Melchester Rovers. If you have Melchester, then you are the only one allowed to have Roy of the Rovers in your team. Everyone else has to return him to the bottom of the pile. This is in accordance with mainstream Race canon - Roy was a one-club man except for a short stint with Walford Rovers as I am sure you will remember.

Thanks for your interest in this series, there will be a few more to come during the season.

Links to previous football game posts on this blog:

Wembley

Soccerama

Soccerboss

Emlyn Hughes’ Team Tactix

Penalty!

Kevin Keegan’s Matchday

The Manager (Terry Venables)

 

El Tel Tells It Like it Is as The Manager

Welcome to another MHR blogpost looking back at the world of football games before the age of the personal computer and games consoles. I have no recollection of how I came to acquire this pristine copy of The Manager, a game co-invented and endorsed by Terry Venables. It dates from 1990, when I would have been a youngish deputy headteacher with two young children and a tight domestic budget, and Terry himself was the manager of Spurs. Although my own copy, shortly to head to a charity shop, is clearly unused, it’s more likely that I picked it up from eBay around the turn of the century. Today it gets dusted off, literally, for this nostalgic blogpost.

The football-related aspects of Terry Venables’ career are inevitably linked to a large number of other commercial activities. These got plenty of coverage once again when he died in 2023 at the age of 80. I’ll concentrate on this particular board game here, but you can easily track down tales from his forays into the retail world, professional singing, co-writing novels and private members’ club ownership. Some of the novels were adapted for a TV series. What is striking about those articles is the sheer range of the activity. Most of the contributors to the stories are glowing and positive about his vision and business acumen, but he also ruffled some feathers. Similarly, his football and management career was varied and broadly successful, starting with promotions at Crystal Palace, a trophy or two at Barcelona, and then leading the England team at Wembley in Euro ’96.

So, this game. It is manufactured to a very high quality. It benefits from Barclays League branding and three photographs featuring Terry and one other person. Two of them would have been instantly recognisable as Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker. I don’t recognise the third, but it could well be Paul Riviere who is credited as the co-inventor of the game. I cannot shed any more light on him, but the company name on the rules booklet is Glenhope Management with an address in Exhibition Road in London. A quick couple of Google searches also suggests that a Polish Hearth Club (yes, hearth not health) and Restaurant has been located there since 1989, and it is also the registered address for at least one other management company.

The main features of the game seem to be collecting player cards to build a team, managing money, answering quiz questions and, to a certain extent, winning trophies. These two sentences stand out in the light of 21^st century norms and expectations …

“The Manager can be enjoyed and won by those who have no special interest in soccer and it may be found that women are frequently the winners.”

“The player with the most money is declared the winner.”

It’s clear from the rules that there is a huge financial penalty in the endgame for having an incomplete squad. The quiz questions come in three categories – soccer, entertainment and general knowledge. Inevitably some of them have now been superseded. Answering a question correctly was deemed to add a goal to the score you had achieved with a throw of the die. The dodecahedral (12-side) die was part of the player collection mechanism. Other aspects of the game would be common features in many of this type – land on a certain type of square, pick up the corresponding type of card, follow the instructions immediately. I’ve captured a few of those in the photos here. The FA Cup turns up along the way as a side hustle with possible financial reward once a player has reached a certain point on the board. The rules as originally printed have auctions of teams and players at various points, but there is an additional printed slip in my box saying that, “Terry suggests that playing The Manager is improved if players ignore the Auction Option completely.”

Although the first player to pass the Final Whistle space with a full team gets a ten million pound prize from the Banco de Venables, that person may not end up as the winner until a lot of arithmetic is completed. You might even need to calculate the 25% interest on your overdraft. To be fair, the rules booklet is well-written and unambiguous with a final warning that “… should players disagree … we are sorry, but these rules and the answers provided are final.”

If you’d like to pick up a copy of this game for yourself, there are plenty of copies around on eBay and such like with asking prices ranging from £5 to £20. Postage costs would add another several pounds – there’s a lot of weighty paper and cardboard in that box.

The 1990 release must have been successful enough as a product to be re-launched under the leading Waddingtons brand in 1996, with a redesign of the playing board too.

Image credit : sircollectalot.com

Thanks for your interest! Hopefully the photographs that follow will give you a more detailed sense of the gameplay. I have kept a pdf copy of the full rules if anyone needs them.

Terry's Invitation Letter

Links to previous football game posts on this blog:

Wembley

Soccerama

Soccerboss

Emlyn Hughes’ Team Tactix

Penalty!

Kevin Keegan’s Matchday

 

Soccerboss - Living the Dream

Billy Bremner and Mick Jones of Leeds United in all white on the box lid

The Autobiographical Bit

I picked up Ariel's Soccerboss in good condition from a car boot sale a few years ago, to replace an original copy from my teenage years, which had long since evaporated, or whatever happens to neglected board games.  It brings back memories of childhood before the age of daytime TV and electronic entertainment, where it was a great alternative to geography homework (for example).  To be fair, it also brings back a fair few memories of argument and frustration and unfinished business – as I recall, most games at Yapp Towers tended to finish early due to curfew or everyone else except me leaving to do something else.  Such as having a life.

Soccerboss competed with Wembley, Soccerama, Subbuteo and Waddington’s Table Soccer in our household.  For me, it had one significant disadvantage.  You needed four players, minimum.  I hardly had three friends simultaneously at the best of times, and Yapp Towers did not have the space to accommodate four bulky teenagers and Bruce the resident German Shepherd Dog.  Most of my friends were terrified of Bruce anyway and never so much knocked on the door as shouted from the next street.  Plus, the little plastic players would not have been good for Bruce’s digestive system.  So full-length games of Soccerboss were very rare in practice.  The nearest we got was me and my brother running two teams each, usually refusing to trade with each other and selling all of one team’s decent players to our other more favoured team and a cup-final winner-takes-all dénouement.  Financial Fair Play it ain’t.

Soccerboss was marketed as a game of skill and promised you would “learn the problems of management”.  I would love to tell you that I applied my learning in later years as a headteacher, but other than “You can’t spend it if you haven’t got it!”, I am struggling.  The rules booklet makes the standard assumptions of its times, through its exclusive references to “he/him/his”, that the teenage girls would be engaged in other things like playing Heartthrob or running the country.  Or in 1970s West Bromwich, chugging Snowballs and Babycham in industrial quantity if memory serves me correctly. However, I digress – here’s the game stuff.

Step One: Read the Rules - cunningly disguised as a newspaper including a cheeky ad for "Wembley", also made by Ariel at that time

How it Worked

The game is set up for a league consisting of Arsenal, Tottenham, Manchester United, Liverpool, Celtic, Rangers, Notts Forest (sic, that must have annoyed them) and Sheffield Wednesday.  Who knows why they were chosen.  Our first action was usually to throw out Wednesday and replace them with West Bromwich Albion, before engaging in complex coin-tosses or rock-paper-scissors tournaments to decide who would manage the Baggies this time.

A certain number of players of each grade (yellow = international = 5pts, red = 4, blue = 3 and green = donkey = 1) were drawn randomly for each team at the start of the game.  To be honest, much of the final result was decided there and then.  If you drafted a pile of rubbish you would struggle.  The total points score of the 11 on the pitch determined which of the four dice you rolled for your team.  There was a 10-minute period allowed for transfers between each round of matches.  The indicative value of a yellow player was around £70,000, going down to £10,000 for the green makeweights.

Ah, the good old days of 2-3-5.  I have offloaded right-half and inside right ... but have a pile of rubbish on the bench.

... better hit the transfer market!

There are pre-match cards and match cards which in some ways function like Chance and Community Chest in Monopoly with a mixture of Good Things and Bad Things happening at random to your side.  Injuries and suspensions happen and your yellow centre-forward heads off into the sunset for anything up to four matches.  Gate receipts are connected to your position in the league.  There is a set fixture list, and you play a conventional league, and a knockout cup.  You can buy stands, which in effect count double value at the end of the game.  “The CUP FINAL is the last match of the season”, it says.  How quaint and olde-worlde that is.

Gamble !

The object of the game is to be Manager of the Year.  Winning the league is worth 5pts, the cup is worth 4 and being the best financially is worth 3.  Therefore you could win the game by winning the cup and being clever in the transfer market.

A little task for readers: what would be on the pre-match and match cards in a 2014 version of Soccerboss? “Your international centre forward bites his opponent and is suspended for 27 matches…” etc.  Over to you, enter by comment below or to @GrahamYapp on Twitter.  Keep it clean, this is a family website with an impressionable readership ;)

Other Modus Hopper Random Nostalgia

In case you don’t believe me about “Heartthrob”:

Apparently "Captain of the Football Team" is a Good Thing in Stereotypia

Wembley:

http://modushopperrandom.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/diceman-goes-to-wembley.html

Soccerama:

http://modushopperrandom.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/putting-drama-in-soccerama.html

... plus for dog-lovers, a rare pic of Bruce the GSD!

Hopping For Moorfields
If you have enjoyed this post and would like to make a donation to the research fund at Moorfields Eye Charity, then my previous post (link below, see FAQ3) will tell you how and why.  At the time of writing (30 July) I am collecting in the final few pledges and hope to send the final amount to Moorfields in mid-August.  We have raised around £800, but even £1.91 would sponsor me for a penny-a-goal for everything I saw in 2012-13 and get me closer to my original target of £1000.  Thank you in advance!

http://modushopperrandom.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/hopping-for-moorfields-call-for-payment.html