Origins

It was a rainy day in Scotland (again). I was eight years old, stuck inside, and bored. These were the days before games consoles when you either played outside or climbed the walls. Like most Scottish eight year old boys, I loved football with the regular shaped ball, not football with a ball shaped like an egg. I remember my dad gave me a dice. He told me to write down the fixtures for that weekend’s games in the Scottish 1st division and to roll the dice for each team. 1 – they scored 1 goal. 2 – 2 goals. 3 – 3 goals (and so on). If I rolled a 6 that would be 0.

I rolled that dice for hours. Filled pages and pages of notebooks. I broke the league down into the top 8 teams so that it was easy to figure out home and away fixtures. There was no skill involved, no tactics; it was all down to that dice and simple fate. Dundee United would beat Rangers 5-4 one week, and lose 5-1 to Hibs the next. The best thing about it was it unlocked my imagination. The worst? The scores were completely unrealistic. Also, there was no way of telling who scored, or when they scored. So I set about redesigning it from scratch.

In the new version of dice football, 9 year old me split each game into ten x 9 minute segments. For example:

9  18  27  36  45  HT  54  63  72  81  90  FT

Dundee United

Celtic

I would roll the dice once for each team. Roll a 6 and the team would score.

9  18  27  36  45  HT  54  63  72  81  90  FT

Dundee United      0   0    0    0    0     0     0    0    0    1     2    2

Celtic                        0   0    1    1    1     1     1    1    1    1     1    1

Admittedly, a single team couldn’t score 2 goals in a 9 minute segment, but this version and the scores were much more realistic. I think I developed the scoring system with my big cousin. You’d write down a team of 11 players, and after a goal, you would roll the dice again. 1 – defender scores, 2/3 – midfielder scores, 4/5/6 – forward scores. A second roll would tell you which of the defenders (1-4, 5 or 6 roll again), midfielders (1-2, 3-4, 5-6), or strikers (1-2, 3-4, 5-6) scored (all teams played 4-3-3). Another roll would tell you when the goal was scored – for example, in the above game for Celtic’s first goal, if I rolled a 3, it would be 3 minutes into that 3rd segment = 21st minute. The next goal I would subtract the dice roll – for example if I rolled another 3 it would be 81-3 for the equaliser = 78 mins.

I think this must have been around the time I started reading Roy of the Rovers, because soon after this, rather than using real teams and players, we began inventing them. I think my team was called Dalton Rovers. My cousin’s team was called Soccer City. I can even vaguely remember some of the players – Steve Collins, a prolific striker who cost a staggering £1 million (ha!), a skillful midfielder called Nigel Rudge, an overweight midfielder called Dean Lister who scored some amazing goals, a young Brazilian wonderkid called Mazinho… Rainy days were never dull again. I’m pretty sure I even sometimes played Dice Football on sunny days, much to the concern of my friends and family. I knew it was geeky and sad, but there was a whole new world inside my head, guided by the results of a rolling dice. And I loved it.

Two things happened when I was 10.

Thing 1: My uncle came back from America with a Pittsburgh Steelers’ Louis Lipps #83 shirt. The NFL was exploding onto our TVs in Scotland for the first time. There was the Fridge. Joe Montana. Dan Marino. Jerry Rice. Walter Payton. For a few weeks we played American Football in the playground and on the field. I’ve supported the Steelers ever since thanks to that jersey.

(I really dodged a bullet. My brother got a Dolphins’ Marino shirt. Hahaha!)

Thing 2: The ZX Spectrum and the SEGA Megadrive changed rainy days for good. Who needed dice when you had Matchday 2?

Of course, over time, games like Matchday 2 and Madden morphed into Fifa, Championship Manager, and… well, more Madden. No imagination was required. The machines did all the imagining for you. I still loved creating my own Fifa players, while Champ Manager at least had an option to create players rather than use real ones, but it wasn’t the same.

I fell out of love with football (soccer) several years ago. Money was king. Success could be directly correlated to how much you spent. Cheating became acceptable. Brazilians rolled for miles. The beautiful game became… kind of ugly.

So I turned my attention back to the NFL and the Pittsburgh Steelers. In my twenties, I’d stay up late watching highlights of a rookie Ben Roethlisberger. If I was lucky, the Steelers would make the play-offs and we’d get two minutes of highlights instead of thirty seconds. Couple of years ago, I really started watching. I subscribed to all the games. Watched the Combine. The Senior Bowl. The college National Championship. I obsessively started reading Steelers’ fansites and NFL websites. I quickly realised that American Football was (when the refs aren’t favouring the Patriots), the greatest, and fairest sport of all.

And rather than spend £60 on the latest XBox version of Madden, I wondered if it was possible to play a dice football version of the NFL.

I searched the internet but found nothing.

I bought boardgames, but none of them were very good.

So I decided to invent an NFL dice game myself. I call it 5-1 Football (more on that later). I’ve been working on numerous variations over the last couple of years, but have finally refined it to a point where it’s as good, as realistic, as imaginative, and as fun as it’s going to get.

I’ve since downloaded Madden, and as great as Madden Franchise mode is, I always get bored and go back to the dice.

And I still sometimes play it on sunny afternoons…