2024 Football America Team Cards

It's your own, personal professional football universe! Welcome to the 2024 season for Football America, SECOND SEASON Pro Football Board Game's classic fictional professional football league!

Football America was born in 2000 with the debut of PLAAY.com, as an "alternate universe" of pro football. The premise behind Football America is that it's sometimes fun for sports board gamers to play out an open-ended scenario, where you're creating your OWN pro football history, rather than re-creating it from what happened in real-life. With this set of Football America team cards, you arrange your league into divisions or conferences, create a schedule and see what happens! Watch with intrigue as divisional races develop, teams surge or fade, stars emerge, story lines develop—it's all the drama and excitement of a real pro football season, except, YOU'RE writing your league's history as you play! Authentic, exciting true-to-life professional football—on your tabletop, on your terms!

Previous seasons of Football America are available, starting with the 2010 season (contact us for details). Or, you can jump in right now with the 2024 season! Now in its 15th season, the league has now been around longer than any real-life U.S. pro football league except the NFL. As the new season begins, many players and clubs are ready to pick up where they left off in 2023. But some familiar faces are in new places, or are out of the league entirely either by choice (retirement) or after hearing the dreaded words of an assistant, "Coach wants to see you, bring your play book." Then there's the rookie class of 2024, which is chomping at the bit to make its statement. For sure, the Football America world captures all the nuances of the start of a new season of REAL pro football!

We've created a team-by-team "viewers guide" to the 2024 season which you can read/download by using the button above (AFTER we've presented this content in our 2024 Football America Kickoff Show 09.19.24). Of course, just like in real pro football, a key injury or unexpected plunge in performance from a counted-upon star player, or a sudden out-of-the-blue emergence of an unheralded free agent could change everything! YOUR league's story will be totally unique, completely engaging, with unexpected twists and turns that will keep you looking forward to "what's gonna happen next!?"

Over the years, SECOND SEASON fans have come up with a number of different ways to enjoy the fun of Football America. Your 2024 season will include an "instant Results" card, which allows you to gets results of games with a single dice roll. Many fans play a "game of the week" format, setting up a league schedule and designating one game each week as their featured, nationally-televised TV game. Use the Instant Results card to generate results for the rest of the weekend's league schedule, and then cap the week off with the featured game, played in full on your tabletop! Or, use our "express" version of the game to knock out the entire league schedule in a fraction of the time!

Other fans assume the role of coach of one of the league's twelve teams, playing all of their team's games, and quick or "express" playing the others. Another popular project is to quick-play the entire league schedule, and then switch to full-play mode for the playoffs. This usually results in a three week playoff schedule, with a wild-card round, a semi-final round and a championship game, a three or four-game project that can be completed over the course of a weekend or two.

Of course, there are plenty of full-fledged SECOND SEASON Pro Football fans who set aside the Instant Results grid and full-play the entire schedule, every game start-to-finish, keeping complete statistics and posting weekly highlights either on the PLAAY Games Community Facebook page or Delphi Forum, or on their own web site. With a twelve-team league playing fourteen games, it's not a daunting task—many gamers have completed a full league season within a time frame of several months.

Last year we introduced a new four-team developmental Football America “Spring League,” included with your purchase. The response was very positive, so we've updated it (a good number of last year's X-League players have earned places on the 2024 Football America rosters) and we're again including it as a part of the package. There are a couple of ways to look at the Football America “X-League.” Number one, it could be a "league of its own," with a six-game schedule played separately or simultaneously with Football America (depending on whether you envision Football America as itself a spring league), with players available to move from the X-league to fill in for injured FA players. Number two, the FAX teams could be regional "practice squads" of sorts, shared by a trio of FA teams. For example, the Denver FAX squad could be used as a feeder for Golden Bay, Portland and Oklahoma City; the Pittsburgh squad could provide filler for New York, New England and St. Louis. Or—if you’re not a fan of bad football (haha!), you can ignore the X-League entirely, and just use its players as and emergency roster-filler. Totally up to you!

Any way you play it, the 2024 Football America League for SECOND SEASON Pro Football Game is pure football fun, unencumbered by "what happened in real life." You get ratings for twelve teams, over 400 players in all, each individually rated for their football abilities, four developmental “spring league” teams stocked with nearly 200 "fringe" players. Plus, liner notes and a league schedule. It's everything you need to run your OWN professional football league, for under $30—(that's a lot less than Tom Brady is paying to be a MINORITY owner of the Las Vegas franchise!) Or get the PDF version for $19 and print-and-play the same day!