Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
As a longtime manager and commissioner of fantasy football leagues for American football, I approach the process of drafting and curating a team throughout the season much like a chef might approach a new recipe. From the jump, I feel like I know the flavors of each ingredient, but I never know exactly how it’ll turn out until all the pieces are working together at the end. Sometimes it pans out and you have a delightful scone in your hands, and other times you’re left with a gelatinous mess. I was curious to see if Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game could replicate that feeling of accomplishment.
Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game: Take a Chance on Me
Just like traditional fantasy football, Huddle includes a preseason draft, a season of head-to-head matchups, and then a championship game between the two best teams to determine the ultimate winner. Matchups are quick enough that the other Managers aren’t left out if they aren’t in the title game, otherwise they can play consolation games to determine places 3-6 for a full table.
During the Draft, Managers get 20 poker chips to bid on players in one-minute rounds. Players are represented through decks of cards, one each for Quarterback (QB), Wide Receiver (WR), Running Back (RB), Tight End (TE), Kicker (K), and Defense/Special Teams (D/ST). Each player has a star rating from 1-5 stars, which essentially represents the number of dice they will roll during their matchup.
The top card from each position deck gets flipped over, and the timer begins. The draft is a chaotic mess of stacking poker chips, hands colliding, knocking over the aforementioned poker chips, and retrieving chips to bid. At least, that’s what happens when there are multiple desirable players on the board.
After the minute is up, winning bids are collected, and the players collect their winnings, adding them to their roster board. Each roster board features slots for one of each position plus a Flex position—filled by a RB, WR, or TE—and two Bench spots. Benched players won’t count or score during your weekly matchup, but they are free to be swapped into the active roster in between matchups.
The draft ends when all the rosters are filled or the remaining Managers are out of chips to bid with. If the latter happens, those Managers take an additional penalty of one chip per missing position that comes out of their post-draft stipend. We’re ready for the Season to begin.
Managers determine how long a Season they will play, with the Standard Season lasting six weeks. Depending on the number of players, the math for the matchups can be uneven, so there are some recommendations for player counts if you want every Manager to play each other Manager.
Before each matchup, a Team News Event card gets flipped, resulting in an effect that persists that week across all Managers. Each Manager flips their own Player News card which has an impact solely on their roster. This effect can be a positive benefit, such as awarding a player an extra die, or it could be the opposite, where they take a penalty die this week. There are also some major detriments such as season-ending injuries that force a player out of the rest of the game. Brutal.
After checking the News, players can use their remaining budget to pick up players from the Waiver Wire. One player from each position is available in a one-minute auction. If you don’t have an open roster spot, you must drop a player to Free Agency. Any other Manager can pick up Free Agents for free. Before the first game, it isn’t clear who gets priority for Free Agency pickups, so we just randomized it. Normally, it’s the Manager with the worst record.
Finally we’ve reached the matchup portion of the game. Managers go player-by-player, rolling a number of dice equal to that player’s star count plus or minus any modifiers. Whoever has a higher total score for that week wins the matchup, which will usually be between two teams. In 3-player games, it’s a 1v1v1 situation.
Play continues with News, Waiver Wires, and the next matchup. Whichever two teams have the best record at the end of the regular season play one final matchup to be crowned the Champion.
Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game: Rolling, Rolling, Rolling
Condensing the entirety of the fantasy football experience into a board game is a daunting task, and Huddle does a decent job at replicating the ebb and flow of the season, along with the heartbreak. Players can have unexpected big games or dud performances, just like in the real world. Pulling a season-ending injury is brutal, especially when it happened during one of my plays on the eve of the Championship game, forcing me to pick up the 2-star QB available to desperately try and scrape up some points.
All the player cards are made-up; they don’t depict any real NFL players. Likewise, Teams are classified by cities like Dallas or Green Bay, avoiding licensing issues. In a way, this is nice because it keeps the cost of the game down and it prevents the need to ‘stay current’ by picking up some kind of player expansion pack each year. However, the players lack any sort of character, as each position features the same exact artwork of a non-descript player performing a related football action, draped in their team’s colors.
Huddle features exceptional components between the dual-layered roster boards, four dice boxes, individual cloth bags, poker chips, and dice sets for each Manager, and a removable tray that comes in handy for the Draft. It has all the trappings of a premium experience, designed by a person who clearly set out to create their passion project.
I should love the game’s components, but despite the quality, I still find them to be…lacking? The dice, although different colors, are just standard six-sided dice instead of featuring a custom aspect on any of the sides. I don’t really need the player bags—which serve no gameplay function—or four dice boxes when I would only ever need a max of three. Even the poker chips are kind of bland, with ‘Huddle’ written across their faces. I’d also like the scoresheet columns to have bold vertical lines between the weeks, because the fonts in the column headers are counter-intuitive with how they draw the eye down the line.
I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure out why I’m knocking the components and the best way I can put it is that I wish some of that attention was put into making the player cards pop more. I want some characterization between Zane Walton and Jarvis Steele!
Don’t get me wrong—the components are great. I just want more personality.
I found the rulebook to be lacking detail in several areas, particularly around the process of the draft. In a traditional auction draft, Managers take turns nominating players for everyone to bid on, but this free-for-all mentality in Huddle replaces that with some pigskin pandemonium that makes it difficult to follow who’s winning what bid. It also isn’t clear if the remaining players at the end of the auction are moved to the bottom of the deck to pave the way for the first round of Waivers, something that we just assumed should happen.
We also wondered if it was possible to draft more players than your roster allowed, dropping the extras. The thought behind this was to prevent one player from stall-drafting minimum bets until most of the teams were complete and then scooping up amazing players at a substantial discount at the end. And if bidding is allowed, when a roster is full, are any dropped players still subject to the Free Agency pickup by other Managers? The rules are vague in this regard.
The designer has been answering rules questions over on BGG and there is a Huddle Discord server, but considering my copy arrived with two rulebooks—one original and one updated—I was surprised that there were still gaps in the rules even with the latest rulebook on hand.
There’s also a throwaway line about Player Trades, but there is nothing more in the rules than that. Trades are a huge part of fantasy football, so I’d like for some concrete rules when it comes to putting players up on the trading block. We thought about that midway through the season, but decided not to implement anything at that point.
You can boil Huddle down to a dice rolling game, trying to get a higher score than your opponent. Theoretically, you could just count up the total number of stars, add or subtract your modifiers, and then roll that many six-sided dice at once with a digital roller to really speed up the game. There’s some strategy and gamesmanship that comes into play during the draft, but everybody is really vying for the same players with the highest number of stars. The only other way that you can manipulate your dice pool is by drafting multiple duos of players from the same team to give you an extra die bonus for each. Other than that, the weeks go on relative autopilot for the rest of the way.
Overall, Huddle takes great strides to bring fantasy football to the table, and it mostly succeeds in that endeavor. Where it lacks in rulebook polish it makes up for with quality components that I’m more than happy to play with. It simulates a fantasy football season by breaking it down to its base ingredients of chance and expected outcomes, where neither is a guarantee. On my next play, I’m planning on experimenting with increasing the news cards as they add the most variability to the game, but there’s nothing else you can do to get better at the game. It all comes down to the luck of the rolls.
At the end of the day, Huddle is like that awesome football birthday cake I received when I was six years old, where it looked incredible but ended up being less chocolatey than I desperately craved.
