Meltdown Bowl

The old arcade football games had one idea that nobody has done better since: the sport is the excuse. There is a ball, there are downs, there is a clock — and there is also a landmine on the thirty, a referee who takes envelopes, and a linebacker who brought a chainsaw. The football is real enough to call plays in. Everything around it is there to go wrong.

This is that idea built from scratch. You coach — and play as — the Rad Dogs, a squad of irradiated mutts, through a season of five road games against teams who are, in order, already dead, enormous, made of metal, made of swamp, and on fire.

It is an homage and it says so. Every team, every play, every line the announcer says and every noise here was written from nothing, and it is not connected to Electronic Arts or any Mutant League game in any way.

A match is three minutes of clock#

Six a side, a hundred yards and two end zones, and you always attack to the right. A touchdown is seven, a field goal is three, and four downs buy you ten yards. The clock runs during a play, and five seconds come off it after every tackle in bounds. An incompletion, a run out of bounds, a score or a turnover stops it. A game that ends level goes to sudden death, where the next score of any kind wins.

• Call a play with `1`–`5` or a click. On offense you choose between the Deep Bomb, Quick Slants, a Ground Pound run, the Bomb Ball, and a Kick, which is a field goal inside about the 35 and a punt outside it. On defense you choose between the Blitz, Man and Zone coverage, and the Chainsaw Blitz. Every card has its own diagram drawn from the routes the play really runs.
• `Space` snaps it. You start as the quarterback. While he still has the ball, numbers float over your receivers: green means open, yellow means covered, red means don't. Press the number or click the receiver to throw. Control passes to him while the ball is in the air, so run him under it.
• With the ball, `Space` spins. It gives you a burst of speed and makes you hard to tackle for a moment. Without it, `Space` dives, a lunge that tackles harder than a hit and leaves you on the turf if you miss.
• `F` punches. It hurts, it knocks people down, and if the man you hit is carrying the ball he might drop it. Every swing also counts as heat, and heat gets flagged. A late hit on somebody already down counts double.
• `Q` takes over whichever of your players is nearest the ball. On defense it also picks who you line up as before the snap.

The dirty part#

The referee follows the play. When it ends, he decides whether he saw the heat. A flag on you costs fifteen yards. A flag on them gives you fifteen and a fresh set of downs, and they punch more than you do.

• `B` hands him an envelope. For three plays he sees nothing you do. You start with one and the locker room sells more.
• You can also punch him. Knock him out and nobody gets flagged for the rest of that play. The league then sends a replacement who has heard what happened, and for three plays he flags everything he can.
• Bomb Ball lights the ball at the snap with six seconds on the fuse, and it explodes in whoever is holding it when the time runs out. Throw it, catch it and run. Defenders who are smart get out of the way. Defenders who aren't try to tackle it, which works out about as well as you'd expect. Carry it into the end zone and it goes off in the crowd instead.
• The Chainsaw Blitz puts a saw in your hands for one play. Everybody sees it, and the ref does too.

The field is trying to kill everyone#

Every stadium is dug full of something: open graves at the Boneyard, lava at the Smelter and the Bowl, acid in the others. A pit slows anything that walks into it and burns it while it stays there. Landmines blink red, and whoever steps on one goes up along with everyone standing near him. If that includes the ball carrier, the ball comes loose. A dive carries you over a mine without setting it off.

The AI reads the field the way it reads a play. A smart team steps around the mines, and a dumb one finds them.

Knocked out is gone#

Every hit, mine and pit takes health, and a player at zero leaves the field in several pieces. He doesn't come back, not for the rest of that match and not for the rest of the season. Each play starts your healthiest players and rests anyone under a third of his health, as long as there's somebody to send out instead.

A side that can't put three players on the field forfeits, and that cuts both ways. Knock out enough of the other team and the match is won by massacre, with a bonus on top. Lose enough of yours and the season ends right there.

Between games your squad gets half its beating back on the bus, and you spend the purse in the locker room: a rookie, a medic who patches everyone to full, an envelope, a bomb, a saw, spiked pads that make every punch and tackle land harder, and rocket cleats for the whole squad.

Where the score is#

Every point the Rad Dogs score pays 100, and every monster you knock out of the season pays 150. Winning game N pays N × 1,000, so wins add up quickly: a deep season beats a bloody one by about game four. A massacre adds 2,000. After the fifth game the season starts again, and every team comes back bigger, harder and better at reading you.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and your run posts itself when the season ends. Play as a guest and it's kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board shows each player's best season with the number of wins beside it. The arcade page has the longer version of how the boards work, and the other cabinets.