The essence of the perfect season...

[RavennaAl]

What makes the perfect solitaire season??? I've often wondered what it takes. Is it having a lot of teams? Short games? High scores?

When you think about starting your solitaire season, where do you start? Should you start with 6 teams, 8, 10, 12, or more? How many weeks, or games should you play? Should you have 2 divisions, 3, 4 or simply just 1? Should you shorten your games in order to get more games played in less time? These are all just some of the things you need to consider before you start your season.

When I did my fantasy league, I had decided that I wanted to have at least 8 teams, and to put them into 2 divisions. I thought that I would have the teams play each of the other teams in their division twice, and play the teams in the other division once. This created a 10 week schedule, which resulted in a 40 game season. I figured I could play 2 games a week. One on the weekend, and another during the work week where I got in a quarter a night, leaving me a little room for working on stats and posting the results. As it turned out, the season took about 5 months to complete, including 2 playoff games and a championship.

I've always liked playing with 20 plays per quarter, not including kick offs. I developed my teams to be as competitive with each other as I could. As a result, I often get long 12, 14, 15 play drives and didn't want one team to have the ball for an entire quarter, so I go with the 20 plays. I also like having penalties and fumbles. Using the dice added an element of surprise and frustration to the game which made the results more realistic than if I didn't have them.

I played where I was always the offensive coach, and used dice to determine the defense. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I had quite a few high scoring games, and often wondered if maybe my rules were favoring the offense too much. Then, at the end of the season, I had some defensive gems and thought that they were just right.

The result? Well, as it turned out, I was pretty happy with the way it worked out. There was a brief period around the 7th and 8th weeks when I was just getting antsy to have the season over with. Sort of like when you're painting and you're getting tired and just want them finished, but you know you still have a ways to go. The fortunate part was that the teams found a way to keep me entertained. No matter how much I thought the games were going to play out in a certain fashion, the little guys always found a way to surprise and entertain me. You just never can tell what will happen.

So, before you start, think about how you want your season to go. Should it go 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, or longer?? Will you get bored or tired before it's over? Would you rather play shorter games in order to get through the season sooner, or longer games for a more realistic feel? Will your rules create high scoring shoot-outs, or 3-0 slug fests? Will you be willing to make changes mid-stream to correct these problems? Do you have the stamina to finish you season?

These are important questions you need to ask yourself before you begin.

[eflfanatic]

Al,

Very good things to consider, since I am about to begin my 1930's NFL Solitaire Season. I will be using 10 teams to begin. Divided into 2 divisions of 5 teams. Right now working on rosters and trying to develop individual playbooks for each team using the offenses and defenses of the 1930's. I do have several resoures. Books and magazines that have play diagrams and strategies that coaches used during this time period. All teams will be 11 player Iron Man teams and using kicking cards for kicking and punting. Have finished painting teams and based up and doing a little scrimmaging. But haven't decided on the length or format of the season. I am roughly basing evrything on the 1933 - 1939 NFL seasons. Has been very interesting doing all the research so far. Just hope the actual play is as interesting.

[detroitchild]

Good points Al,

Although I had a lot of fun the one thing I struggled with during my solitaire season was the length of games. I had to stop the season in it's second week in order to play in the CBSMF. Now I'm playing in the Great Lakes league and I don't have time for solitaire. I will probably resume after the GLEFL season is over. I'll review these threads to see how I can improve my solitaire experience.

Chris,

Recreating seasons from the 30's will be interesting. I don't think they used the forward pass that much. They did things that would be considered strange today. I'm no expert but they used a lot of college style formations and did a lot of lateraling the ball around. Their kicking game was different as well, i.e trying field goals from punting formations and punting on early downs to change field position. I think they tried a lot of tickery back then as well, various slight of hand plays, including everyone's favorite, the statue of liberty. It will be interesting if you try to recreated a lot of that stuff.

Keep us posted on your results.

D