Subbuteo

Kicking the Habit

I don’t remember how I got my first Subbuteo set. I think it was part of a game collection; but I got a good deal … a half dozen or so teams as well as a play mat/stadium. Each team is a ten …. weebles, for lack of a better word, and a goalie who is a weeble on a stick. (They wobble but do actually fall down, sometimes¹), which you arranged on the pitch — a green playing mat, similar to the green baize of a bridge table, but with a soccer field drawn on it.

Subbuteo. Photo by BGG user “Meat.”

Eventually I took it into the game store and we set it up, almost two dozen weebles on the green mat, and played.

Subbuteo’s rules: You flick your players into the ball. If you hit the ball you keep possession, but the same player can only touch the ball three times in a row. The opponent can flick a player to reposition for each flick you make (and if you miss and they flick into the ball, its a change of possession).

It’s somewhat in real time. There’s more, but that covers a surprising amount. (Much like actual soccer, the rules are simple in theory, but nobody² actually knows them in practice, and it mostly works). So me and several gamers ran around a decent sized table, flicking players into balls, and the ball (most often) into the stands or off the table.

Which is to say … we were rubbish at it.

Look … you flick the guy into the ball, who also keeps Number 6 from escaping from the Village in his spare time. Photo by BGG User “Bob3K”

You can watch people play on Youtube³, presumably better than we played it.

Invented shortly after World War II by Peter Adolph, Subbuteo merges the classic “Flicking” games (like Carrom or Crokinole) and soccer. It doesn’t appear to have been an overnight success, but it grew steadily. After some initial print runs the producers started selling teams with the appropriate uniforms and those took off; Subbuteo peaked with sales of ~300,000 teams per year, but as computer games took off in the 80s the sales declined and basically dried up around the millennium, although there has been a resurgence during Covid and a relaunch or two or three along the way.

Some people never stopped playing. There is still a Subbuteo World Cup, and if you look around the Web you’ll find Subbuteo Blogs, Teaching Guides, guides to how much a team is worth, shops and more. Subbuteo also branched out into other sports, like Subbuteo Cricket, Subbuteo Rugby and other (mostly non-American) sports, although none of those were as big as soccer⁴.

As for my group? Honestly, we didn’t get the appeal. After a few games I rolled up my pitch, re-boxed my teams. and put them in the back of the closet. I eventually sold them to a collector over a decade ago. Much like soccer itself, Subbuteo didn’t really catch on in America.

But while not to my taste, Subbuteo is an 80 year old game that was monstrously popular during it’s time and is still hanging on, which is why I think it is worth of consideration as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century.

1. For fun you can assume they are dramatically flopping to try and draw a penalty kick.

2. It remains theoretically possible for a non-American to know them, I suppose.

3. I did also find several channels on Twitch, but none had any videos.

4. I wasn’t even aware of them until I started researching this.