This article originally appeared in Pyramid #18
Total Attack Soccer
Published by Dakota Productions
Designed by Bruce Powell and Don Lawn
Price: $29.95Total Attack Soccer is a board game for two players that recreates a soccer game — and does it very well. The game comes with a handsome 22" x 15" board, a separate scoring board and timing track with pegs, two penalty shot cards, two dice, 27 playing pieces, and rules in English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic(!).
The board is marked in a hex grid, with basic game starting locations marked as well as standard soccer field markings: penalty areas, midfield circle, etc. The board is roughly 22 by 17 hexes wide.
The basic game plays remarkably well. The game is largely skill driven, with dice provided only if you want to take chances. The offense can simply pass the ball back to a midfielder and slowly, patiently work the ball up the field without ever using the dice. Or they can try for the quick thrust, hoping a forward can break through the defense for a quick score. The choice is up to the individual players, and the game is very satisfying and engrossing.
Each turn, a player has 11 movement points (MP) to split between his pieces. (15 in the advanced game.) Each fielder can move up to 3 hexes maximum. Since a team has 10 fielders, you obviously can't move them all their full moves. Dribbling (moving the ball with the fielder) doesn't cost any extra movement points, but passing and shooting do. So the game requires careful thought in deciding which pieces . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 1, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
