Earlier today, football gaming fans got some bad (but not un-expected) news. Take Two has apparently canceled its proposed new NFL 2k video game. There wasn't any kind of press release or public announcement (that I saw). Instead, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick broke the news in an interview with Game File. The full interview is behind a pay-wall, so I wasn't able to read the entire thing. So I was reliant on other media outlets, such as Insider Gaming, to summarize the interview.

Take Two had obtained the rights to make an NFL game back in 2020. The kicker was that EA still held an NFL-mandated exclusivity on "simulation" NFL games, which meant that anything 2k would develop or publish would have to be some kind of "non-simulation" (i.e. "arcade") game.

However, the little shreds of news that we got about this game over the years indicated that it was in development hell, and may have been completely restarted multiple times. Now, Zelnick has confirmed that the designs that Take Two was experimenting with simply "weren't working out creatively". Take Two couldn't simply make an NFL 2k game like they used to back in the early 2000's, since that would qualify as a "simulation" game. This apparently left them struggling to try to find an alternative identity for their game. Would it be something like NFL Street? NFL Blitz? Legend Bowl? Or maybe ... ugh ... their own variation of Ultimate Team, but without a Franchise Mode to go along with it in order to appeal to sim gamers like me? Well, apparently, none of those ideas really panned out, and the designers were unable to come up with any ideas or prototypes that the executives felt would appeal to a wide enough market to justify the costs of the NFL license and development.

The only product that came out of the deal was a mobile card-collecting game called NFL 2k Playmakers, which went out-of-support after only a year on the market.

NFL 2k Playmakers was a mobile card-collecting game that was shut down after only a year.

You may have already read my review of NFL Gameday (the board game; not the old PlayStation video game). While I was looking up information about that game, I stumbled upon another, slightly older, football board game called 1st & Goal. This was an un-licensed football board game from a small publisher of family-friendly games. It looked incredibly similar to NFL Gameday, except that it seemed to involve more detailed football strategy and actual dice that added randomness to the final outcome of plays.

This looked like a huge upgrade over NFL Gameday's over-simplistic, rock-paper-scissors strategy. I went online trying to find out where I can buy this game, but I didn't find it listed for sale anywhere. It wasn't listed as being in-stock at my local board games' websites, and I had never seen it on the shelves at any of those stores. Believe me, if I had seen a football board game, I would have noticed! It was out of stock on Amazon (but has apparently since come back in stock!), and it wasn't available from any of the online retailers that I commonly buy board games from.

But one online retailer had a 2nd-hand game shop that listed 1 copy in "near mint" condition. So I gambled and bought it. Thankfully, it showed up in great shape, with all the components! In fact, it even included some expansion content that I didn't have to pay for. So I got a bargain!

I was imagining making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

Upon receiving the game and flipping through the rulebook, my first reaction was "where has this game been all my life?!" Seriously, how did this game exist for 15 years without me hearing about it? One of the reasons that I bought NFL Gameday was that I had actually been mulling the idea for Kickstarting a football board game in my head that would have worked very similar. However, NFL Gameday was actually a much simpler version of what I had envisioned. But when I saw 1st & Goal, it was almost exactly what I had imagined for my own football board game.

So, hooray! My dream football board game already exists, and I can play it!

But also, boo! Somebody else beat me to it...

But, I do have some nitpicks with this game, so maybe there's room for me to come up with some revisions and improvements. And given how hard this game was to find, and that very few people seem to know it exists, there might be plenty of room for a competing board game. So maybe I should start that Kickstarter after all...

For a few months in 2025, I had started thinking about making my own football board game. I was even thinking of maybe trying my hand at a Kickstarter.

I was envisioning a game board modeled after a football field, with a little football token and a little 1st down marker. The 2 players would play competing cards against each other that represented play calls, and then roll dice to determine the outcome of the play. I hadn't quite figured out how the length of a game would be determined, or the specifics of how the different play cards would play off of each other. I also had vague visions of a team-building aspect in which each player could draft a selection of "star" players on the team, who could be optionally invoked at specific times to swing a play in that team's favor.

It was all very early and conceptual.

But as far as I knew, there weren't any football board games on the market. Oh sure, there were football-themed skins of legacy board games. You know, NFL Monopoly (or the more generic NFL-Opoly), NFL-themed chess and checkers sets, and stuff like that. But I wasn't aware of any board games that were about modeling or simulating the sport of football. Well, not entirely. I did have an old VHS-based football board game, and I remember playing a pen-and-paper football game with a family friend when I was young. And of course, I was aware of Blood Bowl. But there weren't any "real", modern football board games, that I knew of. At least, I had never seen one on the shelves of any board game stores I had ever visited.

So imagine my surprise, when I was holiday shopping at Target, and I saw this game, NFL Gameday on the shelf!

I was contemplating making my own football board game before I knew these games existed.

I looked at the back of the box, and the board looked almost exactly like what I had envisioned for my hypothetical football board game. The ball and 1st down marker are even magnetic to prevent them from accidentally shifting too much during play! That's a good idea that I hadn't come up with! And low and behold, the players are playing opposing offensive and defensive play cards against each other. This looked like a simple, and possibly even more elegant version of what I was dreaming in my head. Someone had already beaten me to it.

But, as I read the rules, I realized that this game was far simpler than what I would want from a football board game. So maybe my dream game didn't quite exist yet? Or maybe it does, because while researching information about this game, I stumbled onto another game that I had never heard of before, called 1st & Goal (review coming soon!). And that game, looked like a more sophisticated version of NFL Gameday, and closer to my vision of a hypothetical dream football game.

I just had to play this game, and also try to track down a copy of 1st & Goal to see if a football board game would actually work.

Axis Football 2026 is the first new Axis Football game to be released since its development switched to a 2-year development cycle. The extra development time means that I have slightly higher expectations for the game (especially after the previous, 2024 edition, ended up being a bit underwhelming). However, I am still going into this game with the tempered expectations of a low-budget indie game, and the satisfaction that it's a budget $20 title. This means that even if this release is bad, it can only be a quarter as disappointing as any annual release of Madden that costs 4 times as much.

I also put off playing this game until the end of December, even though I bought it on its Steam release date. I kept meaning to start playing it, but my gaming time has been very limited the last few months due to real life circumstances. I was so engrossed in Cities Skylines 2's first major expansion that I kept putting Axis Football off another week. Honestly, I wasn't in much of a hurry to jump into Axis. I was kind of still getting my football video game fix from this year's Madden, since I actually do kind of like the new weekly strategy feature in Franchise that uses coach abilities -- especially once the run blocking issues were patched and fixed (in, like, November!).

The 2-year development cycle also means that I didn't feel as much pressure to play and review this game as quickly as I normally do. I hope the developers at Axis, and anyone who might have been waiting for my review, can forgive me for the tardiness.

Mad scientist

Let's jump right in by talking about the biggest and potentially most innovative new feature of this year's game: the play editor. The previous version of Axis introduced a playbook editor, and this game lets users fill any gaps in those playbooks by creating your own custom plays. This works about how you would expect and doesn't really do anything particularly innovative. In my experience, the play creator is defined more by what it can't do, rather than by what it can do.

A new play creator can be used to fill-in under-developed formations or playbooks.

Your play designs are limited to only the play concepts that exist within the game (including the newly-added Run-Pass-Option (RPO) plays). Concepts like Read Option and Triple Option are still absent in the default playbooks, and you cannot create pure option plays in the play editor. You are also limited to the formations that are present in the game, so you cannot create your own custom formation. So if you were hoping to be able to mod in a college football league and play as a service academy running a Flexbone Triple Option playbook, then I'm sorry, you'll have to wait at least another 2 years. I also couldn't create a proper 3-2-6 defense.

Last week, I wrote a somewhat scathing review of the Bears' come-from-behind win against the Packers in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. While most people were celebrating, I was critical. All year long, the Bears have been coasting on luck. Last week, I said that I suspect that luck to run out, and that I didn't believe that the Bears were actually good enough to compete with the likes of the Rams, 49ers, or Seahawks. Well, now I get to say "I told you so."

But I'm not annoyed that the Bears finally came crashing back down to Earth. I'm annoyed that I have to say "I told you so" about something else.

2 years ago, I wrote about my frustrations with 4th down decision-making. Put simply, I think that NFL coaches are far too willing to go for it on 4th down, and that they should kick field goals more often.

I bring this up because, in my opinion, it was the Bears' decision to go for it on 4th down multiple times last night that lost them the game. 3 times in the first half, the Bears were faced with 4th and short within easy field goal range. All 3 times, they went for it. Only once did they succeed. That success did lead to a touchdown.

But if the Bears had attempted all 3 field goals instead (taking back the touchdown they scored off the one successful conversion) (and assuming Cairo Santos made the kicks), then they would have scored a total of 9 points instead of 7. Had that been the case, Cole Khmet's miracle hail mary catch in the end zone with mere seconds left on the game clock would have put the Bears up by 2 points in regulation. Instead, it only tied the game, and the Bears lost in overtime.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh.

Cole Khmet's last-minute hail mary catch should have won the game, not tied it.

The most frustrating of these failed conversions was the first one, on the Bears' opening drive. The score was still 0-0, and the Bears had the opportunity to put the first points on the board. At this point, you have no idea how the game is going to go, and whether it's going to be a shoot-out or a defensive struggle. As such, I strongly feel that teams should just take the points. Get on the board. Let your defense play with a lead -- albeit a small lead.