One of my more recent board game pickups was Strat-O-Matic Hockey, a game I had long wanted to check out but never really had a reason to. For those wondering, Strat-O-Matic makes board games around each of the “big four” US sports (those of course being their flagship baseball game, football, basketball, and hockey), compiling each sport’s top teams into a stack of cards and a book of rules in an effort to use the board game format to accurately simulate how a typical game would run. Simulator games aren’t tremendously niche anymore, but even with Strat-O-Matic’s long history of making these games, I was skeptical of their ability to accurately simulate a hockey game, with all its speed and randomness, using a board and a deck of cards.
Imagine my surprise when it went decently. There were two ways described that I could play the game, “basic” and “super-advanced;” with minimal expectations and even less experience, I opted to play the basic game. The game was surprisingly intuitive for how many tables, cards, and tables on cards I needed to refer to at each step, and while the random elements of the game did get frustrating (there was a stretch where I drew four consecutive cards involving my team turning the puck over, the last of which led to a goal for my opponent), it was frustrating in a way that felt accurate to the game, if more amplified by the fact that it was a board game that I ostensibly had control over.
The control aspect was the most fascinating part to me, because I didn’t really have control over the game. I decided what players I wanted to send out before the game, and I managed a handful of factors with the offensive and defensive scheme, but for the most part the game was based around what the cards decided and the occasional dice roll. While this definitely would be a negative for some players, if not a deal-breaker outright, it’s not uncommon for a simulation game, and because that was what I sat down to play, I found the game’s commitment to creating a moderately accurate (and it does get much more detailed in the advanced mode) replication of a hockey game quite impressive. There are issues with the game, some vague wordings in the rules that caused absolute chaos on the board, but on the whole it was a very pleasant experience.
The game’s strengths are, unsurprisingly, its rulebook (which isn’t nearly as dense as I thought it would be) and its reference tables (which are exactly as dense as I thought they would be); as a result, the other equipment for the game is noticeably sparse. There are a few tokens for use in more advanced games, but it’s really just a couple of decks of cards, a pair of dice that get rolled pretty regularly, and the board. This simplicity assists the complexity of the game itself, rather than takes away from it, and while there probably could be a way to make the board and other materials in a way that more actively simulates the game, that isn’t Strat-O-Matic’s goal at all. They play to their strengths, and while that does create a handful of weaknesses, on the whole the game is excellent at doing what it advertises.
