The fans of the Russian men’s club champions in 2019, Kuzbass, have come up with a volleyball board game, which is already being ordered by other clubs in the country.
Kuzbass have one of the best online stores among Russian volleyball clubs. Included in the abundance of goods, they have a collectible card game “Strike from the Air“ that costs 900 rubles (about 11 euros) and is described as the “world’s first tabletop interpretation of one of the most popular sports – volleyball“. The game was created by the two fans of the Kemerovo club who noticed while googling that there is no similar project in the world. That is when these two friends decided to begin developing the game and, in just a couple of days, they came up with the basic mechanics and tested it with their fellow fans, receiving positive feedback.
The “Strike from the Air“ will contain cards of real volleyball players. The duration of one match is from 40 to 90 minutes. You need to win two sets of up to 15 points. The playing field is a volleyball court with markings for cards. There are several types of cards: “player“, “coach“, “fan“, “action“. The “player“ cards indicate the role of a volleyball player and his basic parameters for the attack, serve, block, and reception. The gameplay also includes moving a token, a ball token, and two dice. One dice with numbers from 1 to 6 is called a zone dice and it determines from which zone the serve or attack is made. The rotation of players is conducted as in a real game – when one of the blockers goes to the backline, the libero replaces him, and so on. The second dice is a “modifier“ with the following values: 0, -1, +1, -2, +2, and error. As for the gameplay itself, it has several rules for counting the numbers of the two dice, parameters awarded to players on each position, the way passing from setters to attackers is done, watching the score via mobile app, and many more. If we got you interested in the game, check out the article on Biznes Online where everything was explained in detail.
In order not to risk copyright violation, the creators of the “Strike from the Air“ used silhouettes of the players on cards. The first version of the game was ordered by the current Superliga champions Lokomotiv, while several more clubs plan to do the same, which should lead to fulfilling the ultimate goal of the creators – to make the addition to the original game, which will include all clubs from the national championship.
