For my birthday last year, I was going to play games with some friends IRL. Real life plans have a tendency to get changed a lot at the moment, and this was one of them. We opted to switch to playing online using Table Top Simulator and when we were struggling to decide exactly what to play, someone suggested Subbuteo.
The idea of playing a game that relies heavily on real world physics in a virtual setting was rather amusing and so we went for it.
As soon as it loaded up on Table Top Simulator, with boxes of teams and goals and all of the other accessories memories started flooding back.
When I was a wee lad, I was football obsessed. I also liked playing games. So it didn’t take long for Subbuteo to be one of my favourite games.
I have great memories of my dad finding a big lump of wood for us to glue the pitch to in order to keep it flat, drilling a couple of holes into it to keep the goals in position and having to find a wall to prop it up against whenever we were finished. I was also pleased to find out when playing virtually that this was a thing done by others as well.
I used to save up my pocket money to buy new accessories for it – new balls, goals or – more commonly – a new team. Subbuteo teams are generically coloured so that, for example, you can buy one team that might represent Liverpool, Middlesborough, Belgium and a host of exotic sounding foreign teams.
Obviously the players would look nothing like Ian Rush, John Barnes or Kenny Dalglish but having a team in a new colour was always exciting nevertheless. If nothing else, buying a new team means that you had a full team which hadn’t had half of the players stood on and blutac-ed or glued back onto the base at a wonky angle.
My favourite team I had was the England football team because they had put more details on to make the kit look completely like the England kit at the time rather than it being a generic team to use as a representation of several real life times. It felt like I owned something presitigous.
I played mostly with a kid who lived down my road but was a few years older than me. When I was 8 and he was 11, he would be easily beating me but that didn’t matter. I was playing football. This was like the ancient version of FIFA or Pro Evo (and the computer games at the time were far from that standard). We even had a league going where would would play half of the teams each. My teams were always in the bottom half of thhe league but I didn’t care. It was great fun.
One of my main memories from this time is when I was leading a game (for once) and the time had almost run out for the game and I suggested we called it there as there was only a minute left. My friend then sat me down and made me wait in silence so he could show me how long a minute actually is!
As with many things when you are little, you lose interest in them, other things take their place and you can forget about them.
My next main memory of playing Subbuteo is when Alex Boughton arranged a one day tournament at his flat. I went along for nostalgic reasons but remembered I actually really enjoyed the game. I lost the first game to Duncan but won the next few. I remembered that the reason my friend always beat me when I was little was because he was faster and more on the ball than I was and would be flicking his players before I was ready for him, and I used this tactic to my advantage.
I ended up having to play Duncan in a rematch for the final, and was determined to get my revenge. Adrenalin and the passage of time has led me to forget exactly how the game went but Duncan wasn’t ready for my new tactics and I came away with the victory. Here is a photo of me celebrating with the trophy to prove it.
Fast forward several years to playing it online. It is obviously not the same in many many ways but it does allow a lot of silliness, such as cloning hundred of players and sending them onto the pitch to annoy your opponent. Having no idea how hard you are going to flick the players is also quite amusing. It’s not the same but as I was playing with some great friends it was a really fun experience. We split into 2 teams – those interested in football and those not so interested in football. Let’s just say that the result is irrelevant and that the fact that I both missed and conceded a penalty was just because the physics of the game are different. Yeah, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.