Drop the Puck: Tabletop Ice Hockey, Out Before Opening Night
19 September 2026
The puck drops on the 29th
Which gives you eleven days to learn it.
Drop the Puck is a tabletop hockey game with no board, no counters and no deck of cards. Rate any two teams with three numbers, roll three dice each, read the goals. A full game takes about five minutes.
No ties
The bit that makes it hockey rather than football on ice is the last minute. Level after sixty and you roll overtime, one roll of three dice for the whole period. Nothing in overtime and it goes to the shootout, three shooters each and then sudden death, with each club's CGF deciding who scores. The standings give two points for a win and one for losing past regulation, which is how a team can lose more games than it wins and still make the playoffs.
Trailing by one at the end, you pull the goaltender and roll the Empty Net. Sometimes it is the tying goal. Sometimes it is the puck sliding the length of the ice into the open net. A club with a high CGF gets more of the first kind. Nobody is safe from the second.
Two leagues in the box
The 2025-26 Replay Set rates all thirty-two clubs from their full season, listed by city in their four divisions, with that season printed alongside them: the real final table with every club's record, goals for and goals against, the sixteen clubs that qualified seeded the way the league seeds them, a blank bracket, and a scorecard with the real points already filled in and blanks for yours.
The Frontier Hockey League is the other one. Twelve fictional clubs in two divisions with a 22-round schedule, standings, the Frontier Cup bracket and a paragraph on every town. Eleven of them have lifted the Cup at some point. The twelfth is Ansel Falls, who joined in 2019 and are still learning.
And a third league, which is yours
Book Three builds a league from nothing: how many clubs, how the divisions work, what the playoffs look like. Then it builds the clubs - an archetype, an arena with a capacity and an atmosphere, one or two rivals, and a 2d6 roll for where the club came from, which is how you end up with a side founded by a railway company for its workers, or one that moved cities after a bankruptcy and has never been forgiven for it.
Then it gives you a coach and a general manager, who are two different men with two different jobs and two different ways of getting sacked, and fifteen tables that run through a season: training camp, rivalry night, the road trip, the trade deadline, the press, how the room reacts to a win and to a loss, the playoff exit, the review, the draft, free agency and the summer.
And when the Cup has been lifted it ages every club on. Where the club finished, whether it made the playoffs at all, what the coach is like, what the general manager did in February, and whatever got written down during the season all feed one roll, and a rating moves. There is a draft lottery so the bottom does not stay the bottom, a cap so nobody moves more than three points in a summer, and an expansion draft for when the league is old enough to take a new club and everybody has to give something up.
The important part is that none of it touches the game. Book One and Book Two are sealed. Book Three only ever hands them a list of clubs and three numbers each, so a campaign can run twenty seasons without the hockey drifting.
Any season you can find a table for
A club is three numbers, and all three come off a league table. Goals for and goals against give you attack and defence. Points give you CGF.
The catch with the old seasons is that the bands are cut around a league scoring 3.10 a side, which is the modern game. Rate 1981-82 off them unchanged and half the league comes out a 10 attack and a 1 defence, because that season averaged about four. So Book One tells you to work out the shift, add it to both tables, and rate the season against its own average rather than against ours. The Oilers of that era cleared five a game. They are the 10 the table was held back for.
CGF is the one nobody can look up. Most old seasons do not record who won the one-goal games. Points percentage gets you there, and it is the only measure that survives an era change, because it does not care how many games were played, whether ties existed, or whether losing in overtime was worth a point. The bands are cut so they return all thirty-two ratings in the 2025-26 set, so a season you rate yourself sits on the same scale as the one in the box.
The engine underneath
It is the Match Day one, rebuilt for hockey. Every table was recut: the goals matrix, the empty net, overtime, the shootout. Scorelines come out looking like hockey scorelines, shutouts turn up about as often as they should, a fair few games go past sixty, and the worst team in the league can still take a night off the best one.
What you get
Book 1, Quick Play, is the five-minute game: ratings, the matrix, the Empty Net, overtime, the shootout, standings, three season shapes that fit on paper, the playoffs, custom teams and the Name Table.
Book 2, Long Play, is the fifteen-minute one: fifteen events over three periods, a d10 control roll for who owns each shift, penalties and the power play, and five narrative tables where the wraparounds and the plays from behind the net live - two of them for the shift that produced nothing, one for when the referee blew and one for when he did not.
Book 3, Fictional Leagues, is thirty-seven pages on building a league and ageing it on.
Nine sheets go with them, the first of which is a one-page Start Here that maps the download and says what to open first, and then: the 2025-26 replay set with the ratings, the real table and the bracket, standings, game sheets for both modes, the playoff bracket, the Frontier Hockey League and The Penalty Box, which is the fight, the three stars and the story of the night, rolled after the horn.
Two downloads, A4 or US Letter, identical inside. Three six-sided dice, a d10 for Long Play, and a pen. There are three browser tools in the download as well, each one file that runs offline with nothing to install. The first plays the game: both modes, every team, a running commentary that puts the newest play at the top, every rating editable including the built-in clubs, CSV import, save files, and every table in the game rollable on screen with the dice animated. It rolls for you, or it waits while you roll and type the number in.
The second runs a Frontier Hockey League season. The 22-round fixture list is in it, so you type in a score you rolled on the table or let it play the game, round by round, and the standings keep themselves - two points a win, one for losing past regulation, tiebreaks in the right order, the playoff line drawn where it should be. Then the Frontier Cup bracket, best of seven throughout, with game seven of the final at the Bay Arena whoever is in it. Rate the twelve clubs yourself and it stops being my league.
There is a third file, which is the Team Card Creator. Type a club in or import a whole league, and it lays the teams out as printed cards: colours, ratings, the scoring numbers off the book so you are not turning pages mid-period, a goaltender, a captain and a scorer for every roll. Both leagues in the pack import in one click, and the Frontier one arrives with all twelve crests attached, so the deck comes out finished. The logos are in the download as full-size files too, in case you want them somewhere else. It is the tool I used to make the Frontier League cards, and it is in the download rather than sold separately, because a tool is worth more sitting next to the game than on a page of its own.