Welcome to the home of Big Play Computer Football, a project to create a computer simulation of U.S. football. This program is based on a table-top dice game called Big Play Football that is designed with the solitaire player in mind. The computer version is not really intended as a substitute for the dice and paper version -- although running a single game and enjoying the play-by-play is possible. The more appropriate use is for getting quick results -- with statistics -- for games you don't feel like playing out in detail. It's also useful for experimenting with entire seasons; for instance by forcing a specific team to run or pass more than it actually did and then evaluating the results.

This is now in its third release and I'm considering it a beta, since there is a first pass GUI for Linux and Windows (using Qt) and for Mac OS X (using Cocoa). The binary versions should run by simply copying the executable files and all of the .xml files into a directory and running the executable. When using the binary releases, note that "BPF" refers to console versions and "BigPlay" refers to GUI executables. Bug reports are welcome...required, even! :-)

The binary releases come with the team files for the NFL 2000 season. Additional file collections can be downloaded from earlier releases and should work with no compatibility problems. Note that the source archive also contains some support files for dealing with game results. (E.g. Perl scripts for updating a data base, PHP files for reporting league leaders via a browser/server....)

For that, news, and other information, check out the project home page on SourceForge. Anyone who would like to contribute some of their programming skill to the evolution of the program is also welcome to get in touch with me via the project page.

If you'd like to try out the original Table Top game get the original rules, charts, and teams for Big Play Football at its home site.