Hi Chaps,

this is mine and my mates first season playing fantasy footie and thoroughly enjoying it. We are currently doing the official EPL game. However, there has been much bickering over people copying each others squads and we were looking for a potential solution where the league would limit one player per team.

Is this the right game for us? It does sound rather complicated given some of the posts about 38 CB appearances etc. which could put some people off.

Any chance someone can give me a quick overview of how the league works from picking players at the start to week in week out, or suggest an alternative game similar to EPL but with a limit of Rooney being on one team.

Thanks

I did start to play it as I like the idea, but soon got bored of the weird scoring system and lost interest...But I did like the idea that only I can have, say Rooney so when he scores only I would benefit etc etc, not say everybody as we all have Rooney

Me and a few mates use the suns points system but do a sort of draft at the start of the season....get the player list and one person picks say Rooney, he's crossed off the list and can't be picked again then the next person picks drogba and so on. This is ok and is something a bit different but makes sure that all the teams are different and only one person will benefit from one players goals.

thanks DC, the downfall with that though is that you dont have any transfers of players in/out and if you do there is a lot of manual overseeing required in order to police the teams etc.

Though if you say the points system is too weird then I am sure that will put a lot of people off, of course we do have bonus points in the EPL game which does annoy people a lot of the time as well. Pick your poison I guess.

I am sure there has to be an easier way.

A privately run auction game is great to take part in, it's what got me into the game in the first place. I know you can do it through OFL if you are prepared to pay the premium or alternatively you can just use the points from any major FF game (unofficially ) to base your game on, it just takes someone to create a decent spreadsheet to read in the points and administer it. You can have a squad system from which you pick 11 each week, and create a transfer system for new players/those who don't get picked up at the auction - obviously the practicalities of it depend on the number of people involved.

The points system is very weird, and the initial draft so important that getting it wrong will rule you out for the season. Still, I'm enjoying it!

The only free game (other than FPL) that I've bothered maintaining all season.

It's a really tough game to master because of the complicated scoring and bidding systems; it's a high maintenenance opposite of The Sun, I would say but it is challenging and rewarding.

The bidding system is not an auction with a fixed budget where you quote money for who you want and outbid your opponents. Instead, it's conducted by everyone compiling a list of the players they want in the order they want them. Then there's a random draw to decide your bid selection order 1-9 (if you have 9 players). Then the computer goes up and down that list picking the next free player on an indivudal's wish list until everyone has a full squad. This does have the advantage of not needing everyone at an auction but it also takes a lot of the fun out of it.

The tactics I chose were to go against what I expected everyone else to do. Novices always concentrate on the forwards players so I went heavy on defence; I think Reina was one of my top picks for example. I also avoided Manchester City players, as most of the others in the league are City fans and would be wasting spaces at the top of their list with Tevez, Adebayor and so on. Indeed, I went heavy on United and was lucky enough to get Rooney. It pays to spend a lot of time on the wishlist and include everyone you might possibly want; you never know who might slip through the net. Took me 2 or 3 hours to do mine.

Whilst you need to pick up a certain number of the big players at the start, you can do a lot of wheeling and dealing. In my experience, most mini-leagues don't end up with transfers happening between teams simply because everyone is afraid to make a mistake and grant bragging rights to their mates. However, where you can win this one is in picking up players for free, like I picked up Victor Moses this morning. Also worth noting that there a 3-day amnesty on a player who is dumped by other managers but you can place a “want” notice on them at any time in that 3 days.

If you think the bidding system is complicated, wait until you see the scoring system. There are 10 different categories, 5 each for defenders and a pairing of attackers and midfielders. Obviously you have goals, assists and clean sheets but there are categories for “successful passes” for attackers and “defensive interceptions” for defenders. I do like this approach as it’s a much fairer overall assessment of a player’s worth to his team but, on the flip side, a lot of the stats you won’t know what they are from watching the game.

And it gets more complex... rather than simply totting up the goals, assists and what have you, the points system is a “rotisserie”. It’s a rolling scorecard rather than a tally-up of points; in each category, your score at any time cannot exceed X points, where X is the number of players. In my mini-league, my current scores are 9-8-9-9-9 in defence (almost perfect record!) and 7.5-5.5-8-8-9 in MF/FW, which makes my total score 81.

If I look at the assists category, I can see that I’m equal on 30 with one other person, two are one behind and another is one ahead so I could make quick and easy ground on this one – and have been trying to without much success on this. However, if I look at clean sheets, I’m 7 ahead of my nearest challenger and I don’t need to bolster that area of the field; indeed I may even weaken it to strengthen elsewhere.

I believe this sort of scoring system is used over the pond in a lot of their fantasy games, such as for baseball.

And then it gets even more complex! You have a squad of 20 players, 14 of which are active on any given day. Plus you have a fixed number of times you can “play” each postion. You get 38 goalkeeper slots, left and right backs and L&R midfield. And you get double the amount for FW and CB and CM, where you can play 2 players in the standard formation per day. Plus you have 38 each of a “sub” in each main category – DF/MF/FW. Once you’ve used up these slots, you can’t play anyone in the relevant position again.

All of the above means that players who can play in multiple positions are invaluable and you must take this into account when building your wishlist. Take Alexander Song, he can play any of CB/CM/RB and Rosicky, who can play anywhere in the forward positions. I’ve quite often stuck Rooney out on the left wing as I’m short in that category and have the other FW slots filled.

One of the reasons I picked up Moses today is that my forwards have been getting injured lately and I needed some fodder to use up the remaining FW “plays”; at the moment I’m bang on target to use them up but I suspect a few no-shows along the way will throw that off course. Oh, and just to make it slightly more complex again, you can change formation from 4-4-2 to (e.g.) 4-5-1 where you only play 2 FW (FW plus FW Sub) and 3 CM (or possibly 4 if you use a CM as the MF Sub).

I’m two points behind the leader, after leading for almost all of the rest of the season, and I need a minor miracle to pull that back. I’ve done my best in picking up more players who can use up all my playing slots to try and win back a “minutes played” category off the leader. And a few assists would be nice in the last games and I might just do it. I can also hope that the leader has used up all his “plays” but, judging from his transfers this morning, he hasn’t!