Armchair coaches adore vintage board game
Old CFL simulation packs a punch for parlour QBS
Joe “747” Adams is a cardboard quarterback for the CFL’S Saskatchewan Roughriders, with cardboard legs, and a cannon of a cardboard arm.
He’s small enough to hold in your hand; to flick nervously with a thumb as you contemplate your cardboard roster.
Across the table, the Edmonton Eskimos deploy cardboard Warren Moon and hard-slugging cardboard linebacker Dan Kepley, which explains the nervous flicking.
Terry Appleby created these cardboard men, starting in 1974, and kept the hatchery running for years. He distilled brains, brawn and fast-twitch muscles into numbers. Those numbers made a board game. That board game — Sports Action Canadian Pro Football — is, by the reckoning of many who follow these things, one of the great all-time gridiron simulations.
“It’s brilliant. The best board game I ever played,” says Tom Tango, the senior data architect for Major League Baseball Advanced Media, and a man who has launched many an influential dive into sports numbers. “Just the smart combination of the intricacies of how football works, as well as ease of play, was phenomenal.”
A Calgary man, who asks to be identified as “Garth” for reasons we’ll soon relate, made a standing offer during a recent phone chat.
“If you have a copy of it, don’t sell it,” he said. “And if you want to sell it, let me know. They’re worth their weight in gold now. I realize it’s only for collectors or people like me, but those things are invaluable.”
Garth has poured thousands of hours into this quiet, but precocious, little game. He creates updated cards every year, and makes them available for free download. If you want to play the 2019 season with Cody Fajardo at quarterback on one side and Andrew Harris running through gaps on the other, fire up your printer, because Garth has you covered.
“I would prefer,” he says while requesting anonymity, “all credit for the game still be given to Terry.”
Appleby, now retired, is a numbers wonk who worked as an economist with Alberta Agriculture. He made a simulation hockey game, too, in 1985, but he doesn’t think it’s as good as the football game. Both are ridiculously difficult to find. A copy of his National Pro Hockey recently sold on ebay for $284.86 with 21 bids.
“It was a labour of love more than anything,” Appleby says. “The market is so small. I had people from the U.S. writing to me, saying I should make it into an NFL game. But I wanted to stick with the CFL.” Moving parts abound.
There’s the creator, who made copies by hand in his Wetaskiwin, Alta. basement.
There are the gamers, who drafted those cardboard slices, waged entire seasons, kept meticulous stats.
There’s Garth. He’s battling health problems, but keeps the game alive with those fresh cards, doing it in memory of a friend who loved the game and died too soon.
And there are the CFL players upon whom the game is modelled. Their output from any given season can be recreated with card numbers and dice tosses.
“It’s nice to know,” says former Saskatchewan Roughriders receiver Steve Mazurak, who appeared on cards from the mid-1970s through to 1980, “that younger folks can grab an old vintage game, roll a pair of dice, and look up an old name — who the heck was that? Then they can Google it up, and say, ‘Oh yeah, that Terry Greer guy. A pretty good receiver.’ ”
So pull out the box, and set up the pieces. This is the story of a board game.
THE CREATOR
More than a century ago, as brawny players in leather helmets swapped blows on pitted grass fields, parlour quarterbacks — wielding dice and spinners — tried to replicate the game. They never stopped.
Football, like baseball, is a perfect sport to tinker with. Its stop-action flow sets up all kinds of ways you can wage war in the bloodless confines of your kitchen table or living room floor.
Which brings us to a short bus trip in 1983, Appleby sitting alongside Roughriders’ defensive back Steve “Stick” Dennis as they bounced to the CFL all-star game in Vancouver.
Appleby licensed his game through the CFL Players’ Association starting in 1980, which is how he ended up on that bus, showing Dennis his personal game card and his pass defence rating, where values generally range from minus-two to plus-two.
“It was a plus-one,” Appleby remembers with a chuckle, “and he discussed with me why it should be higher than a plus-one. I’d already rated him as almost an all-star, but he thought he should have been better than that.”
It was a labour of love more than anything. ... I had people from the U.S. writing to me, saying I should make it into an NFL game. But I wanted to stick with the CFL.
Years earlier, after getting his masters in economics and taking statistics courses at the University of Alberta, Appleby set about building a real, and realistic, CFL board game and founded Sports Action Game Co. Ltd.
He devised a formula for calculating player cards, thought up a way to use those cards (including blocking at the line and scampering through holes), and launched a mail order business.
Appleby obtained stats from the CFL’S head office. He contacted teams, seeking depth charts so he could be sure of positioning — who, for example, started the most games at left guard for the 1976 Montreal Alouettes?
He personally handled every game.
“I ordered all the dice from Hong Kong,” he says. “They came in a great big bag.”
A typesetter in Edmonton worked on the cards — “a real chore,” Appleby says — and boxes were made at Westfold Cartons in Edmonton, then assembled at Appleby’s house.
Appleby had moved into a new home in Wetaskiwin with an open basement. He placed two-by-eight sheets of plywood on sawhorses, and sorted cards with his wife: One, one, one of this; two, two, two of that.
“We put the whole thing together that way,” he says. “My wife would be pregnant, standing there and sorting cards.”
Appleby figures he lost more money than he made. His yearly sales peaked at 500, after he licensed the game with the CFLPA in 1980 and it moved onto store shelves. “It was a really small kind of effort,” he says.
But he remembers an American magazine doing an independent study in 1976, evaluating football games in nine different categories.
Appleby’s game “came out tied for first with Strat-o-matic Football, in terms of presentation, cards, accuracy, all the various rules and so on. I felt very good about that.”
Packed in each box were basic and advanced versions of the game, which included such touches as a random weather generator that affected field conditions.
Appleby put the game on hiatus for a few years when he returned to university in the late 1970s, then jumped back into it when he left campus.
But it was hard work, and in 1989, he got offers from two different parties to buy the rights to both his hockey and football simulations. That was the end of the Sports Action Game Co.
“You reach a point where your life moves on and you have to make a decision, and I made it in ’89,” Appleby says. “I thought it would carry on with these other two groups, but I haven’t heard anything.”
That doesn’t mean the game stopped breathing. Good gracious, no.
THE GAMERS
Garth had a close friend many years ago who loved Appleby’s game. At some point, the friend’s game disappeared. Garth, knowing how much it meant to him, gave his copy to the friend.
In 2002, that friend — just 39 years old — died of cancer and Garth told the man’s son to keep the game in memory of his dad.
“I had all the seasons, all the fringe players, all nicely boxed,” Garth says. To this day, he’s never landed another copy.
But you can make a Sports Action Canadian Pro Football game of your own, simply by downloading parts on the web (tabletop-sports. com is one key source), so Garth has a homemade version.
And he started making his own cards. He reverse engineered Appleby’s creations, puzzled out the formula, and devoted hundreds of hours a year to watching CFL games on TV. Every game, sometimes twice, keeping notes and spreadsheets.
Death has claimed three men with whom he’s played that game in the past, and Garth says he’s doing it in large part for them.
“It’s a memory thing for me,” he says. “A memory thing. That’s all I can say — a labour of love.”
He’s been sick for a while. Heart surgery a few years ago got complicated — “an aortic aneurysm which became a dissection,” as he puts it. He almost died on the table, and is on long-term disability.
He suffered brain damage, and lost parts of his memory.
“I tried to do the stats the year after it happened,” he says. “My operation happened in January and I try to do (the cards) in November. The ones from 2014 or 2015 are a little off, but it’s a lot better now. I’ve got back to the routine. I had to relearn a lot of the formulas, remember some of them, and why I did certain things. But it’s gotten back to a very nice state.”
And so Garth carries on. Gamers pull those free cards off boardgamegeek.com and get their game plans percolating. The site suggests that any given card set is downloaded between 25 and 250 times.
Garth once publicly indicated he wouldn’t be able to make more cards, but the next off-season rolled around, and there they were.
“I’ll do it,” he says, “until I drop dead. There’s nobody else who can do it.”
THE CFL PLAYER
Few people outside the confines of the Roughriders’ locker-room knew that receiver Mazurak was nicknamed “Sloth.”
But Appleby contacted equipment managers across the league and asked them to divulge nicknames. He placed those nicknames on the cards. Mazurak — who played for the Roughriders from 1973-80 — laughed this month after a reporter texted him a photo of his 1980 card, adorned with the word “Sloth.”
“As my wife says, it would have been better to have a nickname like Cheetah,” Mazurak said. “But a three-toed sloth? That nickname was given to me by (teammate) Alan Ford, which is a story unto itself. A three-toed, slow-moving sloth wasn’t very flattering for what should be a fleet-of-foot receiver. But those things were fun, and they added to the emotional connection players and the fans could have, because Terry did his homework.
“Not many people outside the locker-room knew about those nicknames. People talk about the sacrosanct locker-room, and how it was taboo for outside forces to come in. He got in there. He got to the heart and soul of what the locker-room is all about.”
Mazurak never played Appleby’s game, but Appleby credits the player with helping it gain traction in the 1980s. Mazurak worked as the CFLPA’S first paid staffer in 1980, while still an active player, and one duty was licensing.
With that game, Mazurak saw a chance to get the CFLPA’S logo onto store shelves. He aided Appleby with placement and support.
“As a player, we’ve all got egos,” Mazurak said. “We all want to stretch our own personal brand out to the world. And through a game like Appleby’s, it was an opportunity for players to get on the shelf.”
And people bought those cardboard players. Not in droves, but in bits and pieces. Tango, the aforementioned MLB Advanced media guru and a Montreal native, played with his older brother while growing up.
“We spent a lot of time on it,” Tango says. “To me, it was just so intelligently laid out and easy to play. That’s an insanely tough combination, and this game really nailed it.”
The game can be distilled to this question: How close does Mazurak’s cardboard representation perform to his flesh-and-blood abilities, when you send him on a short route from the comfort of your kitchen?
Mazurak never brought his own card to life. But he was packed into boxes for others to play with. At any given time, in any given house, he can reunite with Joey Walters, Ron Lancaster or Dwight “Easy Money” Edwards, running his routes again.
“They’ll be on shelves forever,” he said. “They’re timeless. People love to go back into the golden years of the ’70s and the ’80s and see their old heroes, like Johnny Rodgers, the Ray Elgaards, the John Heltons.
“It takes an innovator, someone who crosses that barrier, and says ‘OK, I’m going to take gaming and board games to a new level.’ ”
Appleby, meanwhile, has played exactly one game more than Mazurak. After countless play-testing sessions, all the creating and imagining and phoning and marketing, he remembers just one full, headto-head game: He lost 32-7 while playing a friend. The game consumed him so much that the buzz of playing it was better left to those with fresh eyes.
He’s received letters from England. Notes from Chuck Ealey fans, telling him how great he was in college. He sold lots of games in Arkansas, which he can’t explain.
“I’ve got shoeboxes full of testimonials from people, and they’re always nice to have around,” Appleby says. “Sometimes you’re cleaning out a room and you come across these, and they make your day. It’s amazing how people fell in love with the game.
“I’ve got about four or five copies left. That’s all I have left, that I pretty much keep for myself, as a reminder I did it.”
Others remember, too. Those cardboard wafers, the charts and markers, the running quarterback on the box-top ... few have played Appleby’s creation, all things considered. But he found a little, tiny niche in which to make a big ruckus.
“It’s one of the best games out there,” Garth says simply. “It is, without a doubt.”
To me, it was just so intelligently laid out and easy to play. That’s an insanely tough combination, and this game really nailed it.