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 whole franchise in over a 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 hard problems
Getting the simulation to balance was the first: a match model where team strength feeds Poisson-distributed goals — the statistician’s way of making 2–1 feel earned and the occasional 5–0 feel possible — tuned against a headless test that plays a hundred seasons and checks no club quietly runs away with everything. Making it pretty enough that other people would actually play it was 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.
The one I’m coming back to
It went quiet while the World Cup games took over, but this is the deepest of the four and the one I’m returning to in a big way once the tournament’s done. It also settled how I build everything now: one person, nights and weekends, pairing with AI coding agents on everything from the match engine to the foil stamps. What I learned here carried into every game since — agents are tireless about hundred-season test harnesses and transfer-market edge cases, and completely indifferent to whether the game is any fun. That part stays my job.