Snap Count: a Whole NFL Season With One d20

Five Minutes a Game

Snap Count is a dice football game. Two teams, four quarters, one twenty-sided die. A game takes about five minutes and a full eighteen-week season is a project you can pick up and put down for months.

Every team carries three numbers. ATK is how well it moves the ball, DEF is how well it stops you, and CGF is what happens when the game is tight. Before kickoff each side gets a single modifier, which is its ATK minus the opponent's DEF, plus one at home and minus one away. Then you roll 1d20, add the modifier, and read the result off a table.

That is the whole game. Four quarters, then total up.

The Bit That Matters: Nothing To Calculate

The reason a match takes five minutes is that all 272 fixtures come with both modifiers already printed next to them. There is no arithmetic between rolling and writing. If you want a matchup the schedule does not cover, card against card or one era against another, there are two lookup grids with the home and away adjustment already built in, so there is no sign to get wrong.

Here is a game I rolled straight off the sheet. Rams at Seahawks, mods of plus one and minus one.

Q1: SEA rolls  9, +1 = 10  ->  touchdown
    LAR rolls 10, -1 =  9  ->  two field goals
    7-6
Q2: SEA rolls  6, +1 =  7  ->  field goal
    LAR rolls  8, -1 =  7  ->  field goal
    10-9
Q3: SEA rolls  5, +1 =  6  ->  field goal
    LAR rolls  8, -1 =  7  ->  field goal
    13-12
Q4: SEA rolls  6, +1 =  7  ->  field goal
    LAR rolls  5, -1 =  4  ->  no score
    16-12

The margin is four, so the Close Finish runs. The Rams are trailing, their CGF is 3, and they roll a 1 on 1d6, which means they get the ball back with a chance to win it. The drive comes up a field goal.

Seattle 16, LA Rams 15. One drive, one point short.

Where the Ratings Come From

The 2025 set is built from Pro Football Reference's opponent-adjusted offensive and defensive figures rather than raw points, so a team that scored freely against good defences is not treated the same as one that managed it against poor ones. CGF comes from each team's actual record in games decided by seven points or fewer, shrunk towards even for the sides that only played a handful of them, so it is measuring the one thing it actually gets used for.

I simulated the whole set a thousand times before printing anything, to check the engine reproduced 2025's real scoring rate rather than a plausible-looking guess at it.

A Second Season Nobody Has Played

The 2025 season has a right answer, and it is printed in Book 5 with a spoiler warning on the cover.

So there is a second one in the box that does not. The Metro Football League was founded in 1975 by eleven owners who could not get a franchise anywhere else, and in 2025 it plays its fiftieth season. Thirty-two clubs across two conferences, 272 games, seventeen weeks and no bye weeks, because the founder members insisted and nobody has managed to change it since. Not one of its cities has ever had an NFL team, which is the entire point of the place.

It runs the same engine, unchanged. Same modifier, same scoring table, same Close Finish. If you have played a season of the NFL set you can start the MFL tonight without opening the rulebook again.

And Then Leagues Of Your Own

Book 7 builds one from nothing. Roll for cities and nicknames, colours, a structure from eight to twenty-four teams, ratings from the same calibrated band the real teams sit in, then an origin story, a few rivalries and a trophy for somebody to lift. Twenty minutes and you have a league with a history.

The one rule it will not let you break is the rating band. A team on ATK 10 facing DEF 1 would have a modifier of plus ten, which means 1d20 plus ten can never total less than eleven, so every quarter scores at least a touchdown and the floor becomes twenty-eight points a game. It stops being football. The tables in the book cannot roll outside the band, and the book explains why in as many words.

Two Apps, Both Offline

There is a play-a-game app that rolls animated dice, keeps the quarter-by-quarter scoreboard, and narrates what happened underneath the numbers. Every table from the books has its own button on the right, so the one you want drops into the commentary rather than firing at you unasked. Tick a box and it hands every die back to you, so you can throw your own and type what came up.

The other prints team cards, nine to an A4 page, using your own artwork from a folder on your machine. Nothing uploads anywhere.

Both are single files that work with no internet and nothing installed.

What You Need

One d20, two ordinary d6 and a pencil. Eighty-eight pages, print at home, no board and nothing to assemble. Solo or two players.

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