A trading card game built on the parts of indoor football nobody else has.
Prepared for Jared Widman, President
Concept, scope, and fees · Working title
The IFL, Arena Football One, the National Arena League and The Arena League are all playing in 2026. None of them has a real trading card product. The first league to move owns the category before the others notice it exists.
The IFL is the one with fourteen stable clubs, a Yahoo streaming deal, and an eighteenth season. It also has a brand new Athens franchise arriving with no history at all, which is a club a card set can give fans a reason to care about before the first snap.
Real clubs, real players, real photography. Twenty minutes a game, learnable in five.
The reference point is NFL Blitz. Fast, physical, a little over the top, and still recognisably your sport. Nobody is playing a spreadsheet.
The clubs and the players are the product and they get treated that way. No cartoon mascots, no gimmick.
No punts. A narrow field. The Deuce. Motion before the snap. The rules that make indoor football different are the rules that make this game different.
The boundary of the field is made of cards, laid face down by both players during the game.
Hit one and you take it, then drop a card of your own in its place. So the wall is a bluff, a trap, a reward, and a place to stash something you want to come back for. It is rewritten constantly and it is never the same twice.
Only possible in a sport played in a box
A collector who never opens the rulebook still wants the set. A player who does not care about collecting still wants the game.
That balance is the whole design brief, and it is harder than it sounds. Most licensed card products are merchandise with rules printed on the back, and players can tell within one game. Getting both halves right is what makes a set people buy twice.
Hold enough players from one real club and its club card starts paying off. Three, five, eight, each tier bigger than the last.
The durable collectible. A Blizzard fan keeps their Blizzard card whatever the roster does.
Players churn every year in this league. The roster is the annual refresh, and it lands every March with the season.
Concentration is rewarded and never required. Mixed decks stay competitive, so nobody is locked into one club to play.
This mechanic is the engine behind EA's Ultimate Team, a card collecting mode inside their sports games and one of the highest grossing systems ever built in the category. We want the part that makes a fan chase their last starter. We do not want the pack spending treadmill that mode gets criticized for, and the design will say so explicitly.
It is what a collector expects from a licensed sports product, and anything else reads as a novelty item. The league already holds the images across fourteen clubs plus broadcast, so this costs the art budget nothing.
Plays, events and yardage cards are drawn. A contained commission that gives the set a visual identity of its own without paying to illustrate a roster.
The split is functional as well as aesthetic. At a glance across a table, a photograph is a person and an illustration is an event.
A two designer studio that adapts real sports into card games without flattening them.
HAVOC: Gen Zero, the card game we designed, funded in under thirty minutes. Published author. Leads the engagement.
Shares development and playtesting through to a shippable ruleset.
A working game at the end rather than a document about one. You own what we build.
Named up front so there are no surprises later. Any of it can be quoted separately.
There is a second deck that walks through how the game actually plays, and that is what we would spend a call on. After that it is a short conversation about which path fits and when we begin. If your gut says it is not for you, that is a fair answer and we will not chase it.
Zack Howe & Cole Beardsley · Pamplemoose Games
zack@pamplemoosegames.com · 608-576-9798
Design proposal prepared by Pamplemoose Games LLC for the Indoor Football League. All Indoor Football League brand assets, club names, and imagery appear solely to demonstrate this concept and remain the property of their owners. Game mechanics and designs are original work of Pamplemoose Games LLC. AI never touches the game design. Not for distribution.