APBA Football Club Podcast Network

Longtime tabletop sports gamer and collector Giorgio Salvadego gives us a rundown on the state of gaming in Italy from his home region of Veneto (think Venice). He has played in numerous leagues, including the Happy Gilmore Golf Association with APBA luminaries Steve Kanehl, Royce Sleighter, George Gerney and John Wright, as well as the APBA International Bowling League. He's even traveled to...

Former New York City radio personality turned highly successful game designer Mike Fitzgerald has dozens of credits to his name — including the smash Baseball Highlights 2045, as well as Football Highlights 2052, the Mystery Rummy series, and many, many more winners. His latest — and likely last — sports offering, Crunch Time, brings pro basketball to the tabletop in a compact and fun way. He'...

The legions of electric football fans have a real treat in store Jan. 9 through March 3 at “Art of the Buzz: The Art of Electric Football” exhibit at Columbia State Pryor Art Gallery in Tennessee. Curated by Chris LeMay founder of the National Electric Football Game Museum in Spring Hill, the event will be held every weekday and by special weekend appointment by contacting LeMay through his websit...

Sports game designer John Gardiner gives us a U.K. player’s view of the wealth of options on the market — including some of his favorites from Lambourne Games. John’s credits include Replay World of Athletics, Replay World of International Swimming, Replay World of Ice Skating, Triathlon — and even beach volleyball. His personal website “Replay Field of Dreams” is a repository of decades of sports...

Longtime gamer Ronnie Wyatt, inspired by first by PC boxing games Lance Haffner TKO and Title Bout II, and later by Roberto Chiavini’s complete Olympics boxing set and his more recent Noble Arts boxing game, has created a new contender in the boxing game realm.    As Wyatt played Chiavini’s game, he wanted to add more “meat to the bone." He remembered that Anthony Crooks, creator of Glor...

Craig Muder, director of communications for the Baseball of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, previews for us the big events coming up for 2023 (one of which will be the first-ever tabletop sports gaming event, courtesy of the APBA Football Club and our organizing committee). Our conversation ranges from the unlikeliest baseball hero to the nine legends who could start today and win a World Series, p...

American football Italian style comes to Toledo, Ohio, on Fourth of July weekend when the 42nd Italian Bowl kicks off — the first time the Italian football championship will be held outside Europe.    American football kicked off in 1980 when the Italian Federation of American Football was charged with promoting the game in Italy. Since then, about 100 flag and tackle teams comprising ma...

The Professional Football Researchers Association, launched in 1979 in Canton, Ohio, is renowned for the depth, breadth and quality of its knowledge base of American football throughout the decades and around the world. President George Bozeka provides an overview of the organization and its member benefits, and also previews the special events planned for the PFRA's annual convention July 27-30 i...

Straddling the line between pure arcade fun and statistics-based simulation, PSF’s latest iteration, released Sept. 8, features a wealth of new features and aesthetics. Designer Kerry Batts takes us behind his thought process, the many community contributions to PSF 2023, and some of the key new features he’s cooking up for ’24.   Like many great endeavors, Pro Strategy Football by Batts, a c...

Mark "Xcommish2" DerGarabedian has been a fixture in the APBA modding community for years. He started playing APBA baseball at a friend’s house in Fresno, California, and has stayed hooked since. He's even rolled a few games with his 18-year-old son.    Whether playing football, baseball or golf, he's always juggling multiple projects of various lengths — and employing a wealth of h...

Anthony Giacobbe Jr. spent a good deal of time writing for the APBA Journal during a pivotal period for the company — the 1990s — and reviewing version 1's and version 2's of PC games. He also worked on the '90s revamp of the basketball game. He even created a Greek Olympics game, pieces and all, for a fourth-grade history class, and later crafted an early computer basketball game — in the er...

We tabletop football gamers use Pro Football Reference with startling frequency, either to prepare for replay projects or get ideas for them. Alex Bonilla is one of the football minds behind PFR. He joined the Sports Reference family of data brands in March 2018. Since then he's parsed more data than many, and he's got some great tips on how to use the site.   Discount code: Use APBA20 to rec...

Board game designer and educator/coach Joe Slack has worked with more than 4,000 game designers to take the ideas in their heads and turn them into reality. Whether helping games by others off the ground or launching his own titles under the Crazy Like A Box brand, Joe is keen to help game designers hone their vision and game play through a variety of course offerings. His book “The Board Game Des...

APBA Hall of Famer, former APBA Journal writer and former Tampa Bay Buccaneers statistician Ray Dunlap presents his  league-building tips on Aug. 24, 2013, at the APBA Football Club's inaugural tournament at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.    Dunlap, co-founder of the Suncoast Football League in Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1979, lays out a wealth of knowledge — from the id...

For decades, 86-year-old Ange Coniglio has been perhaps the foremost authority on and advocate for the achievements and legacy of the American Football League. The lifelong Buffalo Bills fan created his AFL website (remembertheafl.com) as an exhaustive repository for all manner of knowledge regarding the league — from the all-time AFL roster and a photo gallery of his personal AFL Hall of Fam...

High-level stats and a flair for the flavor of the game — that's the way designer Brian Haferkamp addresses big-league sports in his baseball, basketball and football games.   Brian, a web developer who grew up in the video era and counts Out of the Park baseball among his inspirations, just released his latest game, Uptempo Basketball, this summer. Beginning with 1985-86 NBA season, he...

Join us at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton, Ohio, for the second APBA Football Club football-exclusive tournament. Rebooting our first event, held in the legendary APBA summer of 2013, we want to raise the bar on that inaugural event.   Format (tentative thoughts): 1:10 Rules: 8:35 Why the HoF and why in August: 13:18 Cost (tentative): 15:15 Origins of the event: 17:40 APBA Football Clu...

Russell R. Wren is the latest representative of a significant group that is the future of tabletop sports gaming: retirees who return to the games that fueled their youth.   Wren, who grew up not far from APBA’s original headquarters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, retired as athletic director of the Great Valley School District (the Patriots) before the pandemic. The many players he has coached...

Tim Plum and Peter Donis met on a school bus in seventh grade in 1978 and have been friends and collaborators ever since. Peter introduced Tim to Dungeons and Dragons, and a lifelong friendship and game design partnership was born. Tim, a member of a Statis Pro football league for 28 years, eventually introduced his idea for a football game to Peter. (Tim also played hundreds of Statis Pro basebal...

Ron Pisarz Jr., like so many of us, fell in love with the classic Sports Illustrated football game Paydirt. It wasn’t until about two decades later that, while honing his chops as a software engineer, he revisited that “gateway game” as an exercise in converting it to digital form — and Data-Driven Football was born.    He began circa 2006-07 by calculating the 2005 and 2006 NFL seasons...

Meet your Chicagoland APBA tournament director Rob Spatz. Taking over the reins of the pack-leading competition from Doug Schuyler not long after it was created during that legendary APBA Summer of 2013, Rob has refined the tournament rules and location as he plays host to folks from 11 states. That's a far from from the original five participants of the inaugural Chicagoland event on July 27, 201...

Phillip Schwarzmsnn is a Euro-game expert whose time in Finland working for Nokia gave him a deeply immersive experience in the mechanics of those games. But he’s also a former Strat and Statis player who keeps one foot firmly in the world of sports sims (he began playing Out of the Park version 3 in the early 2000s). He’s aiming to bridge the gap between classic sports sims and contemporary games...

Jack Dolan didn't become a baseball fan until his mid-30s, but his APBA life began in the early '80s during his time stationed in Germany. On Sept. 10,  he will host the first Shoeless Joe APBA Baseball Tournament at Fluor Field in Greenville, S.C. The event cost includes tickets to the minor league Greenville Drive game against the Asheville Tourists that night as well as a tour of the Shoel...

Bryan Aldrich, creator of 4th Street Software, shares his thoughts on navigating the ins and outs of creating realistic but playable games. His board and computer creations include iterations of football, baseball, basketball and hockey — and he's put some thought into creating a racing game.    At the time we spoke (September 2021*), preorders for the v3 version of 4th Street's hoc...

Widely experienced tabletop sports savant Mark Miller, aka Jerry Cuan, shares his varied tastes and takes on a slew of cards-and-dice football, baseball, golf and bowling games. Known for his significant work expanding the experience of Al Wilson’s Fast Drive Football, Mark also has a history of helping Pete Ventura enhance Replay Baseball. Mark’s creativity in terms of conceiving wild replay proj...