Baseball, NFL, Basketball, Hockey, Golf, Cricket and many other sports have a rich history of teams, players, Hall of Famers and magical moments through the years. And every day of every year someone, somewhere is recreating those great moments or creating their own history in a parallel universe of cards, dice, FACs, playing cards, pencil and paper.
It is this parallel universe that the Sports Board Gamer celebrates.
If Avalon Hill, Strat-o-Matic, APBA, Minden Cricket or Lambourne Games are familiar to you, then welcome home!
We cover all sports, but have a leaning toward baseball, cricket and NFL. However, you will find a smattering of content relating to Hockey, Basketball, Golf, Tennis, Rugby, Australian Rules football and many other sports.
The Sports Board Gamer is run by Darren Edwards (pictured here in his sartorial best in 1980s Melbourne with the late, great Australian cricketer Max “Tangles” Walker . They sit together enthralled by Max’s eponymous cricket game, Max particularly so as it was probably the first time he’d ever seen it) who is currently and inexplicably typing these words in the third person (“Don’t let that bother you Darren, just type old boy…” he says to himself).
He publishes his own statistically accurate replay sport board game, Minden Playing Card Cricket, which can be found here, and for many years published replaycricket.com. Much of the content of that site can now be found in the Replay Cricket section of the Sports Board Gamer.
His is an avid collector of all sorts of sport board games (and quite a few others besides). Cricket games are a special interest and his personal collection of cricket board games from the past 100+ years forms the basis of the permanent collection of cricket board games at the MCC Museum at Lord’s, the home of cricket. The exhibition, A Century of Cricket Games, consisted of 70-80% of games from his collection and ran for five years at the MCC Museum from 2015 through to 2020 (stymied in the end by a global pandemic).
So sit back, relax, get your dice or cards out, and enjoy the Sports Board Gamer.