Custom Cardsets & Card Creation

Even if we accept that there really IS a 1992 set (which I am still not convinced about) that still only makes thirteen sets of official cards, plus ABC released a 1999 and 2000 set with their Tabletop football game, and don't seem to have continued development of the game. While these official sets can be tracked down on ebay from time to time it would be great if you could just download the cards for any given season - and that's exactly what the plan is here.

My overall aim here is to have available for download every single set of cards from 1980 when the game was first introduced and beyond 1992 when the game stopped being made. Hopefully I will also have sets available for the pre-1980 era too. If any of you can help with scanning cards in or providing information then please get in touch, I would be very grateful.

But it's not just the official cards I'm posting, but also the full range of custom cards from 1993 and beyond and probably even before 1980. These will be gathered from Statis Pro enthusiasts around the world who all help to keep this hobby going, and I think that we already have almost every year covered. For those of us who are interested in making custom cards ourselves I will be posting full details of the Avalon Hill card formulas that details how to create cards for every position in the game

Eventually I will be providing a program that reads in stats text files and creates an entire league's cards in one go but there will be plenty of other tools and utilities to help you while that comes to fruition. There will be Excel templates posted right away to let you create player cards for each position in the game based on the key stats that you can copy and paste from the NFL site or other stats source. You'll be able to see various customised rules for card creation too and everything will be in web format as well as printable PDFs that will look great

As well as downloads for every team from 1980 to the present day, and some before 1980, there will be a section on team and player cards for those times you just want to find that special player or group of players who excelled. There will be special downloads with commentary for teams like the 85 Bears, 89 49ers, 93 Cowboys and the like as well as other classic teams of the past, Superbowl greats etc. There will also be great players from the past, career leaders in various categories and all time best players for franchise. I have already done some dynamic databases that will allow you to find the SP card for any player in history based on their career stats (for those positions where stats are available), so if you want to play games with 'All time career' players then you can.

There'll be plenty of templates in Word, Excel, PDF and HTML so you can do your own thing too and get your custom cards in the format you want so they look just how you want them, as well as instructions on how to use all these templates and formulas that you can download.

:: Custom Cards

This section will include full details on creating custom cards for use within the game, using the official Avalon Hill documents as well as plenty of adjustments and suggestions that I came up with or found others using. There will be spreadsheets set up to create cards automatically for you, by position as well as a team wide and league wide version. I will be looking ahead to creating a simple Windows program that reads in stats from a text file and creates the cards for you at the click of a button. I'll post the rules and formulas in web format too and some nicely laid out PDFs.

:: Team Cards Database

A complete database of cardsets to download, this will include all the official sets from 1980-1992 as well as all custom sets from 1993 onwards and hopefully previous to 1980 at some stage. There'll be special features on Superbowl winning teams and various great teams in NFL history, as well as the teams who never quite made it to the Superbowl but maybe should have. I'll add any custom cards that you send in to me, and the main goal is to get those into a nice PDF format that will print well and look the part.

:: Player Cards Database

Hall of Fame players, career record holders, and players who had outstanding NFL seasons will be available to download separately if you just want to grab some great names and do an all-pro draft for your own competitions. I'll include career leaders for all the main categories, and the marquee names who have enriched the history of the game. Eventually I will post the all time best players from each franchise with cards based on their total career stats as well as individual season cards. I also have some dynamic databases that allow you find the statis pro card for any player that ever played the game (well, at least those with recorded stats) at the click of a button.

:: Templates & Instructions

Will deal with the issue of layout, formatting and printing of custom cards including templates that you can use for your own projects and instructions on how to use them in Excel or whatever format they are in. There'll also be templates for game scorecards and stat logs so you can print them off an d have them handy when you play a game.

:: Credits

The following people are credited with creation of the various custom cardsets available for download. I will try to keep this updated, and if you know of any errors, or other authors for these cards, let me know. Card sets listed in bold are the official Avalon Hill cards recreated via the Statis-Pro typing pool Project

 

Last update: 6th January, 2007© Lee Harris