While I was looking at my Strat teams and STATS team, perusing numbers, thinking about a topic, I found myself in the middle of several fantasy football drafts.

That made me remember how much fun I used to have playing Strat-O-Matic football, which, along with Risk and Scrabble, I regard as the best board games in creation.

Natch, I found Strat-O-Matic football because I was already playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. It had some complicated rules, but of any sports game or simulation I ever played, it came the closest to the real thing. If memory serves, you even had to roll the dice to find out a weather factor, which impacted the subsequent rolls.

Usually, during the football season, my pal Bill Emrick and I would get together every Wednesday night. We each drafted three teams, and we would play them off against one another, trying to dupe our own Super Bowl.

Bill played the game a few times before I first played with him, and it took me a few times playing before I could finally beat him. Of those first times, I got blown out once, but the other two times he beat me towards the end of the game when I went into a prevent defense, which is how I learned one can lose a game by being too cautious. Now, when I watch games each Sunday and an NFL team does what I did, I watch with a different perspective.

Around the time we played, the Niners were a hot team, and they had Fred Dean, a tremendous pass rusher. His card was a plus-11 or minus-9 or something that made him deadly to use during a passing situation, but a hole when a run was in his neighborhood.

So, I needed to learn to platoon and really start to try and figure out what the offense was going to do, and who they were going to pick on. I also learned a good offense will pick on your weakest spot, over and over.

When I finally did beat Bill, I crushed him with the Steelers, with a Terry Bradshaw bomb to John Stallworth on my first offensive play and never let up, guessing pretty well all game.

I also remember having the Browns and being down by 20-plus points deep into the third period. Mike Pruitt rolled snake eyes on his card, which was a TD with an asterisk, meaning from scrimmage, no matter how far. Pruitt got a 93-yard TD run from that, and Bill's team flubbed the ensuing kick-off, and I scored again. I ultimately beat him with Brian Sipe, and six offensive players with 40 receptions or more, because as the game neared an end, he played a prevent defense.

From then we played pretty even. Since a game took about three hours, just like an NFL game, we played one a week. It was good fun, and it really made me look at football in a completely different way, which is a pretty amazing for a board game. I like to still play Strat-O-Matic baseball a lot. Via TSN, where a three-game series is played overnight, is OK, but the computer version, where you hit the enter key every time you want to roll the dice is better.

However, the best were those Strat-O games where you sat opposite your opponent at the table and dropped those dice into a box (Bill and I used to use the box tops from Avalon Hill Strategy and Tactics games), watched them stop spinning, and then looked to the card to see what the starts had in store.

It was so tactile.

I am not sure if the Strat folks thought about marketing the game online, or via computer. I truthfully never look at my letters from them, or online enough to know. But I hope not. It would just not be the same.