Football Fun With FLOTA!

Our new fictional soccer league is ready to hit your game table--say hello to the FLOTA (Football League of the Americas)! Think BIG time soccer, BIG cities, BIG crowds, loud. It's like the top English pro league, but with a fresh, festive Latin American twist!

FLOTA consists of twenty teams, situated in the biggest cities of the Americas. The league has been specifically engineered for competitive balance. You can expect a fierce battle on all sides of the table, with relatively small separation from top to bottom, compared to other similar pro leagues. Statistics for scoring, cards, kicks, headers and everything else will be in synch with established pro parameters. In short, FLOTA will provide you with an exciting, unpredictable, open-ended and realistic big-time soccer experience!

If you're a long-time PLAAY gamer, you'll know that FLOTA isn't our first fictional soccer offering. In 2014, we produced the World Football Association, a fictional representation of that year's World Cup. We followed that up with a second set in 2016. Several dozen of the 2016 WFA stars are still playing in 2024, and have signed contracts with FLOTA. Ryan Sullens, Sami Kanady, Khaydarbi Kadi and over 100 others from the WFA are ready to re-ignite their careers on your game table! For those who are interested in the league's history, we've prepared a list of all the WFA players who’ve made the transition to FLOTA, you can download it and review the player list here.

We inaugurated this new card set at this year's PLAAY-Dot-CON, it was a huge success. We posted an overview of the tournament in our convention recap blog post. Mexico City, coached by James Cast, won our inaugural FLOTA Cup Championship, defeating Luke McEvoy's Sao Paolo club 1-0. It's noteworthy, I think, that in the overall Cup standings, these two clubs finished in the middle of the pack. Here are the complete convention standings...

This points to the competitive balance I intentionally engineered into this set, as mentioned before. Our thought is that you should be able to play a number of different projects with this set and have the potential for a different champion every time.

Statistically, our convention play averaged almost exactly three goals (3.01) per game over 97 games played. The most goals scored in any game was eight (New York 6, Guayaqul 2), two games had seven goals scored. One other team matched New York’s six-goal outburst, Buenos Aires, in a 6-0 thrashing of Toronto. On the other side of the spectrum, we had six scoreless draws, about 6% of all games. This matches up very well with the EPL average for scoreless draws (about 7%).

The home team won 53 of the 97 games, with 26 draws. Again, with teams so evenly matched, home pitch becomes an important advantage. For our convention event, we rolled a decider die before each game to determine the home team. This created some crazy imbalances, which should be taken into account when reviewing the standings. Santo Domingo, for example, played ten of its eleven games at home! At the other extreme, Santiago played five of its six games on the road. We weren't too concerned about a balanced home/away schedule, our main goal was to test drive the game with new people.

The modified “sub boost” rule we experimented with at the convention will certainly be of interest to people who pick up the new "express" version of the soccer game. The game includes rules for a "sub boost," which captures the effect of fresh players entering the pitch after the 60th minute. The rules are geared for solitaire play, implementing the effect with minimal decision-making. However, the convention play was entirely head-to-head, and I felt that the sub boost rule should have more strategic impact. So, we amended the rule as follows...

• The sub boost can be called for at any point after the 60th minute, not just when a black or white "6" is rolled (pointing to the player on top of he sub stack).

• The sub boost can be implemented at any time during play, even after a failed die roll/check. So, for example, a quality match-up die roll asks for PACE and the neither player has it. Either coach, then, can play their chip to "win" the check, and create a scoring chance.

• The home coach gets final say in chip playing--they can use their own chip to negate the effect of the visitor coach's play. Or, they can retain their chip and hope that the visitor chance fizzles. The visitor coach cannot mitigate chip play by the home coach.

Michael Owens and I came up with this idea a couple weeks before the convention, and it worked very well in limited play-testing. Well enough that I felt confident trotting it out for convention play. I was a little concerned that the new rule might inflate scoring, Michael felt that it might DE-flate scoring, as coaches would use the chip to kill off scoring chances by the other team. As it turned out, it was completely balanced both ways with a net-zero effect. So, if you want to use this rule, you're welcome to do so. I did not include it in the final rules set, mainly because it adds decision-making time to solo play, which I felt might defeat the purpose of an "express" game.

For those who'd like to try a two-tiered FLOTA arrangement, we recommend two ten-team leagues, A Champions League and a Challengers League. You can use the standings we compiled during our inaugural FLOTA Cup Championship at PLAAY-Dot-CON 2024, posted below, separated into the two proposed leagues. The standings also include an Instant Results letter grade for use with the universal soccer instant results chart (available as a free download from our website).

To help facilitate the competitive balance even further, The FLOTA set comes with a subset of transfer star cards. Basically, as commissioner of the organization, you can assign these players to whomever you choose. Thus, ANY team in FLOTA can become an instant top-of-the-table favorite, with the addition of one or more of these soccer superstars! This is a turn "evergreen" card set, one that will always be fresh and open to new competitive twists.

Originally, I planned to offer duplicate cards for transfer players; that is, I'd take the best players in this FLOTA set and simply create a duplicate "all-star" card that could be transferred to any team. I began to cool to that idea, mainly because it would require removing the player's from the original team, and those cards could easily be lost or misplaced. Or, if the cards stayed with the team, someone might forget that they'd been transferred. I then considered making a whole set of NEW fictional players to be used as transfers, but felt that people might feel like they were missing out by not putting them in the set. Really, the intent isn't to include ALL the transfer players in your current league. Rather, I wanted you to be able to beef up a favorite team or teams by adding star players.

Anyway, late in the process, the idea occurred to me--"why not offer REAL players as transfer options?" This serves two purposes: 1) it allows the flexibility that I intended all along to make any team great, and 2) it adds to the feel we hope to create that that FLOTA is a MAJOR football league! It also makes it easier to set the transfer players aside entirely, if you want to just start playing. I won't spoil the surprise, but some of the best soccer players in the world are available to be signed with our all-new league! (Alternatively, you could create a juggernaut world football all-star team that would be VERY difficult to beat, that might be fun as well!)

I do want to emphasize, though, that the transfer players are completely OPTIONAL! We invite you to insert a few of them into your favorite FLOTA teams, and see what happens! Or, just set the cards aside. In the end, it's up to you.

We’re very excited to begin a new chapter of fictional world-class football! Join us for the maiden voyage of the FLOTA!

If you have any questions or comments, let us know--we're happy to help!