Subbuteo

[The F Bomb]

Mad that this was a thing. Scrabbling round a big bit of felt on your hands and knees, flicking little flimsy plastic heroes at a monolithic ball. Did anyone ever successfully have a game?

Scratch that.

Did anyone ever successfully string two passes together?

My memory is being really excited and thinking today's the fucking day bros, we're going to properly have a match and getting everything set up, sorting out the formations and getting a stopwatch and putting our full footy kit on, shinnies and boots and my mate wearing a massive pair of his dad's goalie gloves so basically instead of hands he's now got flippers that fucking stink. We blow the whistle and take the knee and instantly crush a load of little footballers and snap them off their hemispherical shackles.

FUCCKKKIIINNNGGG SUBBUTEO

Any fans here?

[imitationleather]

I thought the extra stuff such as stands with little plastic fans, TV towers, floodlights, dugouts, medical teams etc. were extremely cool.

Never actually played a game though. Partly due to being an only child with no friends and partly because it was too fucking difficult.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

yeah. I had the trophies and the stands and all that. used to make m'father buy me stuff whenever he actually turned up for divorced dad duties. real life deso?

28, etc

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I think my favourite subbuteo thing was the orange adidas tango ball so you could pretend it was snowy

[Dex Sawash]

never thought anything could worse than buteo

[buttgammon]

I thought the extra stuff such as stands with little plastic fans, TV towers, floodlights, dugouts, medical teams etc. were extremely cool.

Never actually played a game though. Partly due to being an only child with no friends and partly because it was too fucking difficult.

Yes! As a model it was great but as an actual football game, less so. I did play it sometimes but I think my friends and I always gave up.

[idunnosomename]

can anyone do a summary of the attempts to make tabletop football games that weren't so fiddly as to be unplayable? there was one where they had magnetic bases with springs in so you hit the top of the player to shoot.

of course there's table football/foosball which is tremendous fun. especially when your goalie gets stuck on the ball right in front of the goal.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

What was the name of the other game where the little football men were on magnetic stands and you had to press on them to make them "kick" the ball? Had a spell with that too but it wasn't as immersive for me

edit: you literally beat me to it when I was typing 

[Sebastian Cobb]

there was one in the gang who had scalextric...

[idunnosomename]

i had this for some reason.



the TV ad claimed it was "even better than real thing!". cant say I disagree

[mattyc]

I owned a Subbuteo set as a kid and always found it a bit rubbish. It was a right faf ironing the pitch cloth every time I wanted to play, so I ended up sticking it on a big piece of chipboard. I must have done the sticking unsupervised though as one end of the pitch was really unevenly stuck and bulged out massively towards one corner. Rubbish.

Got back into it in my 20s with a friend - we were always stoned when we played. The games got pretty intense - he usually won and I really didn't like losing! But the games were really boring, just shoving players around the midfield winning and losing possession. There would only ever be like 4 chances of a shot in a 30-minute game and whenever that happened there would be a massive long pause as one lined up the shot and the other waggled the goalkeeper around on his stick. Rubbish game. Stupidly we used to play in a room where there was a PS with PES and a computer with FM, both of which are way better than Subbuteo.

[Vodkafone]

My mate had Subbuteo cricket. Hard to imagine that was/is a real thing, but here it is https://subbuteocricket.com/box-sets/test-cricket/

With some skill and practice it was possible to actually bowl pretty accurately at the stumps, but there was an excessive number of sixes scored, unsurprisingly. The teams were national I think, not county, and generally apartheid in skin colour. I guess you could get busy with a brown or black marker if you wanted to, or Tippex for Brendan Nash.

[Senior Baiano]

I think my favourite subbuteo thing was the orange adidas tango ball so you could pretend it was snowy

That was cool, but I don't remember there being a white 'snow' pitch available, which seems such an obvious thing to have that it retrospectively irritates me

Or maybe you were just supposed to sprinkle cocaine or talcum powder on your existing pitch?

[thenoise]

Had and loved both Subbutteo and Subbutteo cricket. Sneery cunts.

[mattyc]

I did enjoy Subbuteo cricket the few times I played it, very satisfying to get a shot or a delivery just right.

[Vodkafone]

I did enjoy Subbuteo cricket the few times I played it, very satisfying to get a shot or a delivery just right.

You could vary the pace and length, it was probably a more satisfying and accurate implementation than the football one.

[confettiinmyhair]

We didn't have a table big enough so I remember playing the game on the green pitch glued to a MDF board on the floor. This meant you'd play the game sitting on the floor. Often I remember players getting crushed by a stray arm and the despair of a subbuteo playing breaking.

[Jim_MacLaine]

"J U S T I C E!"

[Endicott]

It was Striker where you pressed the players head. It did not, at least in the 70s, have magnetic parts. It's biggest innovation was introducing diving goal keepers.

The ribbon that went round the pitch to keep the ball in play was always too tight so you had to weight the pitch corners down with books.

[Steve Faeces]

I had the USA 94 box which had the kit and Germany and USA teams. My Dad stuck the pitch to a big sheet of fibre board for me. As a peculiar and unlikable child I resorted to simulating entire world cups and league seasons on my own. Fixing every game so the team of my preference won but never by such an egregious scoreline that it would arouse suspicion if anyone looked at my notebooks where I recorded the scores, which they didn't.

[another Mr. Lizard]

Our local sports shop in the 70s had a good range of Subbuteo - I had the rugby, angling (!), and five-a-side 'Football Express' sets as well as a regular footy box. Never got the cricket, played it a few times at a mates' house though. I think there was a hockey set too. Once I got 'Football Express' I always used the smaller white ball from that in place of the outsize brown one from the standard edition.

As for white pitches, I had two methods of recreating an edition of 1972 Star Soccer with Stoke City bogged down in three inches of flurry. Crumbling up sheets of polystyrene and sprinkling them over the baize; or, my dad worked in technical drawing/industrial building design and used to bring home massive rolls of white paper with a hint of grey/purple to them, which I cut into squares and stuck to the pitch (sometimes leaving the penalty area 'green' as if the groundsman had cleared that and then said 'not arsed' about the rest.)

Games at home with my younger brother, and also at school in my second-year class's lunchtime Subbuteo league, quite often ended with punches being thrown.

[Old Thrashbarg]

i had this for some reason.



the TV ad claimed it was "even better than real thing!". cant say I disagree

Loved this game. It came with different balls with holes on one side so you could alter the position before bowling to get the ball to "swing". And batting was surprisingly varied and skillful.

[Poobum]

Had this as a kid. Total Action Football, though my version was more modern looking. Great fun playing against my dad on the kitchen table.

[Old Thrashbarg]

By far the most enjoyable football boardgame/table-top game I played was Waddingtons Table Soccer: https://www.oldfootballgames.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=124659

Essentially tiddlywinks with the aim being to get the ball into a goal, but with much more variation than you'd expect from the simple premise. And it took seconds to set up and get playing, which always made it much more appealing than Subbeteo.

[LordMorgan]

Loved it as a nipper
Got it for Christmas 89

My dad then went and got some plywood to pin the pitch on so no bumps
Me and my pals had regular games
With a tournament in the summer , we even had a wee trophy
Later a couple of years
Then amigas/ mega drives kicked in and we moved to sensible soccer , which was fucking amazing

[Shaxberd]

Warhammer for sports lads innit

[BlodwynPig]

table rugby with 2 pence coins

[thenoise]

table rugby with 2 pence coins

Oooo nice one Dave! But can 'e convert it?!?

[Jittlebags]

Su-su-bbuteo [trumpet stabs]

[madhair60]