Tecmo Bowl is a card game now. What else can we turn into tabletop games?

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I’m not quite the age where Tecmo Bowl was a critical part of my childhood, but I certainly remember playing and enjoying it.

There’s a reason the game has stood the test of time, and not just because of the power of nostalgia. It was the first home console video game to include an NFLPA license, so kids could play with their favorite players. It represented the start of an era where game systems were sophisticated enough to represent something that actually looked like football. And it was fun!

Of course, like almost every NES game from the late 1980s, once you play it for more than 15 minutes, you begin to see the limitations. Each team’s offensive playbook is a whopping four plays (making it more of a playtweet), with little variation. The original NES port didn’t have an NFL license, so you couldn’t play with the actual teams (a later version, Tecmo Super Bowl, included both licenses). And of course, there was the matter of the famous game-breaking bug (?) that made Bo Jackson impossible to tackle.

So it’s old, and if you wanted a video game football experience, you’d probably reach for Madden before the ol’ two-buttoned NES controller. But so what? It was fun, and it’s still fun, so long as you make sure your friend doesn’t pick the Raiders.

But it isn’t just fun as a video game. It turns out …Tecmo Bowl is also pretty fun…as a card game?

Buffalo Games, a toy company that mostly focuses on jigsaw puzzles and family-oriented games, recently acquired a license for the Tecmo Bowl assets and turned the beloved Nintendo game into a card game. It’s true. I have a copy sitting on my desk right now.

Unlike the video game, the Buffalo Games version does not carry an NFLPA license, so there’s no Bo Jackson card you can play that lets you automatically win the game. But everything else is surprisingly faithful to the source material.

Players pick from four play cards to call an offensive or defensive play. How the cards match up with each other explains the play’s outcome. So in the example here, the offensive called Long Pass, while the defense called Run Left. Whoops! We can follow the arrow by the ball carrier, which then tells us to roll a yellow die for the play outcome. In this case, a 20-yard gain.

Just like in the video game (and mostly in real life), if you call the right defense, you’re more likely to stop the offense behind the line of scrimmage, maybe even forcing a turnover. Load up the line of scrimmage to stop the run when the offense called a long pass? You could get torched.

Players can also play unique cards specific to each “team” to add more variety, like bonuses for broken tackles or yards after the catch. So there’s some strategy, but just like the video game, this is not some massively complicated football simulator. I played this with my 10-year-old daughter, who knows nothing about football, and she figured it out pretty quick.

How and why did this happen?

Tecmo dissolved in 2010, and the rights for the Tecmo Bowl assets are controlled by a company called Koei Tecmo Games. That’s whom Buffalo Games was able to work with to secure the licensing agreement needed to make the game.

Licensed projects aren’t the core of the Buffalo Games inventory, but they have done similar projects before. The company also sells a board game version of Pac-Man and would look at other potential IP that could be converted into games. Is Tecmo Bowl the start of a new card game strategy?

“While sports-related IPs and formats aren’t exactly underserved in the industry, success ultimately comes down to timing and the strength of the license. There are several evergreen, non-licensed sports games that have held space in the mass market for years—like our own Flip Kick Soccer—because sports themes resonate. They’re immediately understandable, widely appealing, and great for gifting.” said Sara Cayem, a marketing associate for Buffalo Games.

“When thinking about a license, it’s critical that it adds value. Tecmo Bowl stands out because it’s a brand that is meaningful to so many, stirring up feelings of nostalgia (which is super relevant in games and the current cultural zeitgeist)…. Mixing an iconic brand like Tecmo with a fun game leveraging familiarity of classic play is a recipe for success, and we are hopeful to bring a multigenerational game to consumers.”

So iconic and available IP + the ability to turn it into a family-oriented game = Tecmo Bowl the card game.

Okay, but what does this have to do with college sports? Was this entire exercise an excuse to play on the nostalgia of the mid 30s-40s audience for Extra Points?

No, of course not. I would never do something like that.

But I mention this not just because I figured some pictures of Tecmo Bowl the Card Game would perform well on social media. I think it’s an example of a clever approach to licensing that should also be applicable to college sports.

In the post-House world, every single program, from Alabama to North Alabama, is trying to figure out how to earn more revenue for its department. That isn’t just to pay for the millions of dollars needed to participate in revenue sharing, but also to pay for new software, new administrators, new insurance, etc.

But there are only so many rich donors to shake down for money, and chances are, most programs have already been begging those folks to cut big checks to NIL collectives over the last few years. While I imagine many schools will look to optimize their ticket revenue (which doesn’t just mean raising prices, btw), a more common solution will be to put a new emphasis on growing multimedia rights revenues.

That means selling sponsorships on stuff that hasn’t been sponsored before (like, say, ads on a football field). That means selling more ads, or more expensive ads, on stuff that’s already being sponsored (scoreboards, billboards, social media, etc.). And it may also mean finding ways to grow licensing and merchandising revenues.

Are there ways to make more money selling licensed t-shirts? Probably, especially if you work with partners that make shirts that are different from everything else you’re selling. There are ways to make money selling licensed beers, licensed coffees and probably some version of the entire Sharper Image catalog with a Block O or Power T on it somewhere.

But I respectfully submit that it’s also time to think about completely new categories or use cases for athletic department IP. We have one college football video game, which is awesome, but we’re probably not getting a direct competitor to EA Sports College Football in the near future, and nobody will sell me licensing rights cheaply enough for me to include them in Athletic Director Simulator 4000 (yet). If you want more licensing revenue from games, well, somebody is gonna have to make more games.

Could those be different types of video games? Maybe. But they could also be card games, board games, mobile games, or products that aren’t games at all. Perhaps there’s a new type of collectable out there that will sweep the nation. Maybe some college athletic department will decide to really lean into the nostalgia trend and release a College Sports Tamagotchi clone. Personally, I hope that school is Western Kentucky, but I’m suggestible.

Now is the time to let a thousand flowers bloom. Try something different. If it flops, oh well, fans, and consumers will probably forget about it in a few weeks.

But if you can turn a football video game released in 1987 into a fun tabletop game, I suspect there are other good ideas out there that we just haven’t figured out yet.

Note: While Buffalo Games did send me a free copy of Tecmo Bowl, it did not purchase any sponsorship packages, nor did it give any financial compensation to Extra Points. Tecmo Bowl will be on sale later this year at Target.

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Here’s what else we did this week:

• I broke the news that Sacramento State was leaving the Big Sky and headed to the Big West. Here’s what else I’ve been told about that move, Sac State’s next steps, and a potentially busy end of June on the conference realignment front.

• We have a Serious Professional Book Review about one of the most important programs in college football history, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

• I filed 150+ FOIAs and got the operational budget for every men’s and women’s basketball program that made the NCAA Tournament…and a bunch of programs that missed the postseason entirely. Here’s who spent the most, least, and everything else we learned.

I can do original reporting on conference realignment, travel to industry conferences, interview interesting people in the college sports industry and make all of this my full-time job, thanks to folks who pay for premium subscriptions. Ad sales are great, and they are playing an increasingly important part of our business, but the majority of our revenue comes from readers like you. If you enjoy Extra Points, please subscribe to the full edition today. You get four newsletters a week and access to ADS4000.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you on the internet on Monday.