About FUBA

FUBA in short

  • 2-players football board game
  • Game time 1,5 – 2 h
  • Full tactical football match simulation from the coach view
  • Dice are used to resolve events and generate game situations
  • Current version: 3rd edition

Football game for strategists

FUBA brings a realistic football match to your gaming table. It’s a game of tactical skill that includes all the important details of football. You must make the vital decisions faced by real coaches and lead your team to glory or defeat. Which formation will you use, 4-4-2 or 4-5-1? When is the best time to make substitutions? Will you attack with short passes or crosses into the box? Do you have a well-organised defensive line or do you use a sweeper keeper? Make your choices wisely and develop winning tactics to outfox your opponent!

In FUBA, you compete head-to-head at the tactical level and simulate the most important events in greater detail. Outcomes on the pitch are decided by dice rolls and your decisions affect the odds of your team’s success. A typical match contains roughly 40 turns. Players choose actions for their teams, like where to play the ball, move players, press or block passing routes, when to shoot etc. In your first few matches you will learn the rules, but as you play more you will develop your tactical skills. To beat your opponent you will need to have a good game plan and successfully react to your opponent’s tactics.

The rulebook is divided into two parts. The first part has basic rules for learning the game while keeping game play simple. The advanced rules bring in all the details of the game: player substitutions, fatigue, sweeping goalkeepers, offside risk, player skills, injuries, and even the chance of a streaker!

FUBA development history

Somewhere year 2008 a first draft for FUBA was introduced. A bunch of new ideas to simulate a full football match in a game board from a tactical point of view. Initially FUBA was played among the designers’ and their friends, but after some years the first version of FUBA was published in 2013. The game development did not stop to that point, but the game design continued to improve to game to get more and more close to real football. The 3rd edition of the rules were published in 2021, based on worldwide feedback from hundreds of games. 

Basic ideas

FUBA is based on following ideas:

  • The game board (football pitch) is divided to thirteen areas. The number of areas is minimized to make the game play enough fast to play a full football match within a reasonable time.
  • The ball contains numbers from 1 to 6. The number in the ball tells the current situation in the match. The smaller the number is, the better ball control the team has. If the ball number is 1, the controlling team has a perfect situation. The number 6 indicated a poor ball control with a big risk to lose the ball to the opponent. 
  • Player pieces are not numbered in the game board. They just indicate the overall team position in the pitch. The coaches do not make decisions how the independent players act in detail level. 

Interested? Read the rulebook learn to learn more!