Case study · NO. 03
Where the cards came from.
Before the World Cup games there was this: a whole football-manager sim in a browser tab. It's the first one I built — and the card meta everything else inherited started here.
- Order
- The first game
- Engine
- Poisson match sim
- Season
- 38 games + FA Cup
- Status
- Returning big post-Cup
Football Manager, in a tab
This is the game that started it all, and it wears its inspirations openly: the depth of Football Manager and the browser-native charm of b1231games’ sports sims — Baseball Century and its kin, the ones you’d run a franchise in through a whole lunch break. You pick one of twenty real clubs and steer a squad of procedurally generated players through full 38-game seasons plus the FA Cup: formations, a transfer market with an AI that counter-offers, board expectations, aging, retirements, regens. The two things I still lose time to are the ones that make it a game rather than a spreadsheet — opening packs and watching a player you scouted actually develop.
The two hard problems
Getting the simulation to balance was the first: a match model built on team strength feeding Poisson goals, tuned against a headless test that plays a hundred seasons and checks nothing runs away. Making it pretty enough that other people would actually play itwas every bit as hard — the retro card treatment, the 3D tilt-and-flip, the foil stamps. The trading-card layer here is the direct ancestor of the World Cup Card Collector; that game is a descendant of this one. It went quiet while the World Cup games took over, but it’s the one I’m returning to in a big way once the tournament’s done.