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We simply couldn't be MORE excited about this new College Hoops PLAAY-Down card set for Highlight Maker Hoops! It's probably the most ambitious card set we've ever offered in our 25+ years in the sports game hobby. If you're a fan of college basketball, this might just be the ultimate tabletop experience for you...
Where to begin in telling you about it?
I guess it should start with a nod to the original College Hoops PLAAY-Down cards, which we created in 2022. 64 teams, fictional schools, open-ended college basketball fun. We wanted to capture all of the excitement and drama of the real-life annual college basketball tournament, but in an open-ended "don't know what's gonna happen" sort of way. We specifically wanted the set to be "evergreen" for maximum play value, which is why there was no year printed on the cards (it's the same for this edition).
The set was a big hit at our convention in 2022 and after we released the set to the community as part of our 2022 Holiday sale, there was not a small amount of discussion about expanding the PLAAY college universe to include more schools. I created a football version of the fictional college concept the following Christmas for the 2023 college bowl season, sixteen teams--some of the same schools from the hoops set, some new ones.
Then, at some point, maybe as a product of these twin releases, PLAAY Gamer Ethan Musulin sent us a more-or-less fleshed-out framework for an entire fictional college universe. Naturally, we were intrigued: Ethan is a kindred spirit when it comes to alternative sports leagues and projects. Many thanks to Ethan for the conference alignment ideas, many of which "made the cut" for this new PLAAY-Down card set. And, it was Ethan's creative burst that provided the general impetus to make this thing happen.
What can you do with this set? Wow. There are so many options, you're limited only by how much time you have to devote to your hobby. These cards can be used to generate Instant Results, Highlights "sports center" recaps of game, or full-play, possession-by-possession college hoops action using the Prime Time full-play module. You can run your own personal, custom-tailored hoops project that fits your time and interest, everything from one-off games with the Instant Results grid (which take seconds to resolve) to a complete season Prime Time play-through for EVERY team of EVERY conference (which we estimate would take about eight years to complete, assuming you played a game EVERY day!). Probably you will land somewhere between those two extremes. But I think it's safe to say, you're not likely in this lifetime to exhaust the possibilities this set offers!
Your set comes with 64 fully-carded (9 players per team) college tournament teams and an official bracket, with four regions, sixteen seeded teams in each. The ratings data comes from the teams that participated in the real-life 2025 college tournament--in essence, our PLAAY-down tournament teams are sort of an alternate presentation of the real-life 2025 field, although the conference alignments and regional assignments are quite different. The remaining 128 college teams are fully unique and fully playable as well, captured in what we think is a pretty cool way...
Each non-tournament team has two cards: a coach card and a team roster card. The coach card uses the same format as the coaches for the tournament teams (see images on this page). The team cards are designed to allow you to assemble teams of individual players from the two sets of 36 "generic" numbered cards that come with the PLAAY-Down collection. The "home" (or "favored") team uses the dark gray cards with the white uniform numbers. The "visiting" (or "underdog") team uses the white cards with the dark gray uniform numbers. The uniform numbers correspond to the numbers printed on the team cards. Simply choose the nine uniform numbers/cards listed for each team--that's all there is to it! You can then make your starting line-ups normally.
There are a couple other things about the set that fall into the "new and different" category, we're excited to tell you about them...
• Newly-reformatted scoring grids for the highlights version of the game. The readings of the original college game grid are the same as before but we've re-packaged them in such a way that it's easier to grab in-game scores. There's also a new "Low Scoring" grid which you can use as the situation dictates. This new grid will generate average final scores in the 50s instead of the 70s. We created it as an option when a team wants to slow the game down to try to keep it close against a superior opponent.
• Team-specific coaches. This is the biggest change from the original PLAAY-Down set. Each team has a specific coach card, vs. the original set's open-ended approach where it was up to you to decide who coached who. We've incorporated many of the previous set's coaches into this new set, so if you got the original set you'll recognize some names (but they may be on a different team from where you placed them!).
• Table Gamer Guide to the complete PLAAY College Universe. There are fourteen different conferences in the PLAAY college universe along with a group of 27 independent schools. You can download the list here, a printed copy is included in your PLAAY-down package. Your package will also come with an alphabetical listing of every school, including its nickname, Quick-Rate grade and conference alignment. This will allow you to craft your own tabletop project(s), by conference, team or region and complete play at whatever pace suits you.
We could go on and on, but the bottom line is, we're super-excited about this set and we hope you enjoy it. It's been great fun in play-testing this concept and we think you'll experience the same. If you have questions, let us know, we're happy to help.