PSF 2022

The Complete Game of American Football!

Unlike any other football game, PSF encompasses everything that makes American Football so popular!  Whether you enjoy classic or modern leagues with their differing formations, relish the most flexible coaching on the market (with thousands of plays at your fingertips), love to pore over rich stats, run simulations using a realistic simulation engine, watching game played out live before your eyes, relive single seasons, or play the fun career mode, PSF has it all!

Leagues, Teams, and Players

Leagues, Teams, and Players

The main play component in PSF is the league, which is a collection of teams, but much more!  Every league can be distinct, letting you play historic leagues (modders have created every NFL league from the 1940s to modern day!), college leagues, or even your own fantasy leagues made up of fantasy teams and players (elves and dwarves, why not?)!

Your league has:

  • 2 to 130 teams!
  • Pro or College level
  • Rules – very flexible rules let you choose historic rule sets or create your own!
  • Roster size – can be 43 or 53 players!
  • custom league names – championship name and stadium, league name and year
  • default offensive and defensive sets allowed – choose historic formations or mix and match!
  • custom images, player photos sets, sound sets, even your own names files for colleges and player names

Every team can be customized!

  • name and mascot, stadium (open, closed, name), weather settings, and more!
  • coaching attributes on offense and defense and coach photos
  • team attributes such as discipline, ball security, and red zone offense and defense!
  • offensive and defensive formation sets

Player ratings are core to the game!

  • name, jersey, and photos
  • draft information
  • appropriate attributes for their positions!  These ratings are a critical factor in determining how the team performs!

Simulation Engine

Everything in PSF is centered around the game engine, a result of a Master’s Project, input from an NFL head coach, and years of improvement as football continues to change.  If your simulation engine is weak, then your whole game is weak and unreliable.  The PSF engine computes results of every play, using player and team ratings, weather, and every aspect of the offensive and defensive calls to determine all the possible outcomes and their percentages.  This is done whether you are watching the game or letting the AI simulate it quickly in memory, so the results are the same!

What you see played out in the animation is a choreography of the engine’s results, so you’re getting realistic results, not affected by twitchy fingers!  AND it means that you will see results that happen in real life, whether it’s getting three fumbles in a row or watching a great QB lead his team against you in the final minutes.

Most importantly of all – the AI never, ever, ever cheats!  No one enjoys playing a game where the AI cheats, and it’s been my philosophy from the very beginning that I would rather improve the AI every year than ever take the route of a cheating AI.  After all, I love playing PSF myself!

Coaching

If you like getting in the trenches and mounting a consistent offense or leading a tough defense, then you will love the coaching options in PSF!  For beginners or for those times you want a quick game, you can coach using the Casual mode, which is similar to some past board games.  It’s great fun!

But if you want to have literally thousands of plays at your fingertips, rather than the dozen or so canned plays that other games force you into, then coach with Advanced mode!

And you can tap any player to view his ratings and stats, and easily sub in different players for key situations!

Offense

In Advanced mode, set your formation, strong left or right, your type of play (from misdirection plays such as trap, counter, and reverses to standard runs to short, medium, and deep passes), and your primary target.  Hold backs or tight ends in to block against strong pass rush defenses or use play action to freeze their linebackers.  Run different motion and routes to set up mismatches!  Bring in a FB at your HB position to get that crucial first down!

Defense

Set your players to focus on run or pass and then set their formation, line shift, run keys (or double-team), coverage, and whether any LBs or the FS blitz!

Career & Season Play

When you want to introduce some management aspects to your game, PSF has Career Play! Start with any basic league that has two conferences and 32 teams or less and pick your primary team. You can also select options such as whether your career includes free agency and/or players retiring! Finally, be sure to set your league’s rules, but don’t worry, you can change them each season!

Career Play adds in the factor of players aging, improving (and worsening), sometimes leaving your team, and challenges you to build and maintain a winning franchise!

During the Season phase, you can coach any team, watch games play out, or quickly sim a whole week or even the whole regular or complete season! After you see your players new ratings in the offseason, you can scout the upcoming free agent and rookie drafts, choose your franchise player, and then trade draft picks to improve your placement in the rookie draft. After picking up some great players, you finalize your roster and head to the next season!

A ton of information is at your fingertips – whether it’s your team’s “Team News and Stats” or viewing Career Leaders, Career History, or Transactions, or viewing the current Season’s standings, stats, and leaders, or getting a complete injury reports of all major injuries and players currently out! You can also go review past seasons and even rewatch highlights from games in the past seasons!

And as with Single Season play, you can export Season Data and modify depth charts!

Single Season Play

Fitting nicely between Exhibition pick-up games and full-blown career play is the handy Single Season mode. In this mode, you take any league, load up a corresponding schedule, and play through an entire season! You’re not required to have a primary team, and you can coach, watch, or simulate every game of the season! You can do everything that career play offers, except it’s only one season – perfect for playing a 130-team college schedule or a league that mirrors your high school league!

Custom Schedules

A fantastic feature in PSF is the ability to use custom schedules in season and career play! You can replay any actual season schedule (mod creators have dozens from real life on their site) or create your own! Take a 1977 league and play the actual 1977 schedule! BUT you also have the option to change the playoff formats! Play “what if” with more or fewer wildcard teams!