Editor’s Note: Over the Christmas week the Meeple Guild will be offering up a game-a-day as a holiday treat. Enjoy!
YORKTON - Up front, I am a huge sports fan.
That said soccer is not among the sports I follow in any detail at all – I might have a MLS Whitecaps of TFC game on as background noise three-four times a season.
So I wasn’t exactly expecting to like StreetSoccer a lot.
This one was created by Corné van Moorsel back in 2002, and apparently in locales in Europe is popular enough to have players gathering in leagues and to play tournaments, which admittedly piqued my interest.
What makes StreetSoccer worth looking into is that both the board and rule set are available in the files section for the game at Board Game Geek. A quick print job, a few cubes or checkers, and you are ready to go.
The soccer field – board -- is 10 spaces long and six wide -- plus there is a score tracker outside the field which is a nice touch.
Each player – it is a two-player game – has five pieces. Ideally you would have some player meeples, but wooden cubes etc work fine too.
While there is an abstract strategy ‘feel’ to StreetSoccer, movement is actually determined by a die.
The roll of a D6 determines the number of spaces to move one of your pieces. If you reach the ball you shoot the ball by the unused number of pips on the die plus one, and can make passes between ‘players of your team’.
There is a lot of back and forth here – it’s soccer after all – with the die actually creating that in-game feel pretty well. Sometimes a good roll allows for a great play, other times you trip on your shoelaces.
The ‘luck’ factor can be mitigated to an extent with wise plays, but it remains a factor that will even out things for players of differing abilities too.
It is easy to understand after a play why this one is popular as a ‘pub’ game where soccer is more popular than it is here. It would be a game worthy of a Sunday afternoon over brews.
