Basketball Bonanza: Bringing the Madness to YOUR Game Table!

Here's an amazing new card set for Highlight Maker Hoops created by PLAAY Gamer Jule Sigall, Jule has rated the ENTIRE 68 team NCAA college basketball tournament field for our game! We played with these cards at Dice Tower West in Vegas last weekend for our full-play hoops play-test sessions, and they were sensational. (How Jule was able to do this many teams in such a compressed amount of time, I'll never know!) I'm absolutely certain that this set will provide the PLAAY community with a memorable March (and beyond) pre-PLAAYing and RE-PLAAY-ing this year's college basketball tournament!

Here are some details about the set, and a couple of guidelines and adjustments...

• What You Get: The package includes all 68 teams for the 2024 men's college tournament. Each team contains nine players and a coach. Each team's seed, region and record are listed on the coach card. The teams are also arranged so that the first-round matchups appear on the same page. Note that the play-in teams have the letter "a" or "b" after their seed, and the "a" teams are paired up with the higher seed in the first round. The set also includes bracket sheets (an awesome touch!), so that you don't have to find or create your own. Just print, and PLAAY!

• Positions and Usage: Most college teams do not have a center, so Jule suggests modifying the Highlight Maker Hoops rules to allow ANY combination of positions in the starting lineup, even five guards. We implemented this rule in Vegas for our full-play action, and it worked just fine. Jule also suggests requiring all players with a usage rating of solid circle to start and filling out the rest with open circles, and ordering the bench according to usage grade.

• Player Experience: Players' experience is noted by their class (Senior, Junior, etc.). If you're using the optional experience add-on for Highlight Maker Hoops, Senior should be ICON, Junior SEMI-ICON, Sophomore SEMI-PROSPECT and Frosh PROSPECT.

• Injured Players: Players who are unavailable for the actual tourney due to injury are not carded in this set and have been replaced with the player who played the next most minutes. In a couple of cases teams did not replace injured player but went with a smaller rotation, in these cases the injured player has a usage grade of “†”. Jule suggests leaving these players out of the lineup, but they are carded in case you want to use a full 9 players.

• Scoring Grid: Use the college hoops scoring grid we created for our College Hoops PLAAY-Down card set, posted in last month's CONNECT.

As a special bonus, we've created an "Instant Tournament" add-on which borrows from the Hoops Universal Instant Results chart we posted in last month's PLAAY CONNECT e-newsletter. You do NOT need to own Highlight Maker Hoops to enjoy this freebie! Using this package, you can pre-PLAAY (or re-PLAAY) the entire tournament in about a half an hour! Complete instructions are included, as well as letter grades for all of the teams included in the tournament. Just plug in the team grades (which were calculated using adjusted team winning percentages based on strength of schedule), and start rollin'!

And best of all--it's ALL free!

• Download Jule's 2024 Men's College Hoops Tournament package here...

• Download the PLAAY 2024 College Hoops Instant Tournament package here...

And please join us Thursday evening 03.21.24 for a special hoops-centric PLAAY Space YouTube stream, using these downloadable goodies! 6pm MDT, 8pm EDT on the PLAAY Games YouTube Channel!

Let the madness begin!