Flip Football – and a history of football card games
Ok, so we’ve written before about Flip Football, and the fact that – unusually for a football card game – it’s based around action.
What do we mean by that? Well, here’s a potted history of football-related card games.
- First, came the cigarette cards.
Yes, over a century before the online casinos were all over the beautiful game, it was the cigarette manufacturers who spotted a healthy marketing synergy between their products and running around energetically on a Saturday afternoon.
With the image of a famous player included with each packet, smokers – and presumably their offspring – would eagerly trot to the tobacconist in the hope of landing an elusive Billy Meredith.
Naturally, collectors started trading with each other. But these giveaways couldn’t really be said to form an actual game.
- So somebody designed one.
The people at Guinness World Records date the earliest dedicated trading card game to the USA in 1904, with a baseball card game that the marketing folks at the Allegheny Card Company cleverly entitled ‘The Base Ball Card Game’.
GWR claim that the game bombed commercially, prompting its immense rarity value on today’s collectables market.
But we’re sceptical; several other sources state that only one set of cards was ever produced (a hand-cut prototype), and individual cards have been auctioned for $loads over the past few decades without duplicates turning up.
Frankly, if we had $loads for every individual part of every prototype game we’ve come up with then we’d be on a beach somewhere, drinking cocktails and playing Flip Football.
- But the 'game' concept caught on.
Cut to the post-war period. Other industries – such as chewing gum manufacturers – joined the card craze, and started to build upon the concept, including potted histories, trivia facts and little quiz questions on their own football cards.
By the 1970’s, game mechanics were fully part of our football card ecosystem. We’re now looking at Trumps, that game that strongly favoured your annoying friend who knew exactly what statistic was on exactly what card, and could always remember whether you had it or not.
A small amount of action was involved, in an initial flurry of card-exchanging activity. But this tended to be followed by a grind of attrition as piles of cards waxed and waned forever. Apparently, some of those games that started in the 1970’s are still going on...
- Which brings us to the modern era...
...and Flip Football, the game we developed for young football fans who just want to Get On With It.
It’s been a hit as a pocket-money/stocking-filler purchase for a few years now, precisely because it isn’t like other football card games.
No stats, no memorising, no marathon stalemates… just two sets of cards divided into attack and defence, and SLAM, SLAM, SLAM – that’s an opposition goal foiled, but you’ve scored one directly from the break!
Shots, saves, penalties, free-kicks – they’re all in there.
It’s a card game with the immediacy of ‘snap’ – easy to take anywhere and with literally zero set-up time required.
For two players, aged 8 years or above.
#best job in the world
