Dan Doyle of Stokenchurch tells us about his great new board game Matchday Mayhem which is due to kick off soon, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign. Can you help him reach his goal and share the love?

Football has provided plenty of fun over the summer & another season has begun. But one football fan has also spent the summer honing his own fun strategy card game to enjoy off the pitch.

Matchday Mayhem is a three or four-player game starring a cast of cool characters from the mind of Dan Doyle, including elegant passmaster Egor Monchellet, clinical target man Mo Slider and cast-iron defender Donni Repsteel.

“I have a deep-routed necessity to have creative, personal projects going on to enrich my spare time,” says the Man United fan who grew up locally and went to Gillots school. “In the past, and still sometimes now, it’s been music production and DJing. But I wanted to explore a game that invoked my artistic side, even though I didn’t know I had one!

“I’ve always loved card and board games; as a child, Cluedo was my favourite and I became quite a good chess player. I have two little sisters and I often made up games for them which they enjoyed. As I grew up, the friends I surrounded myself with also enjoyed games – we’d often stay in and compete rather than go out, like true-blooded geeks! So I always knew I had the ability and just tapped into my passion for football to push it forward.”

Once Dan had picked football as the theme, he knew an original concept was vital to set Matchday Mayhem apart from the many tabletop football games on the market. “Traditional football is of course played on a rectangle pitch with two teams head-to-head. Down at Mayhem Meadows, we play on a square pitch with a goal on each side, all doing battle for the ball at once. You use attack and defend cards to play actions and the first player to an allotted number of goals wins. This is the game’s true USP: being able to play three or four-player matches. There are also 36 originally designed players all with unique strengths, weaknesses, style and star quality.”

Dan played homemade versions, with eight & four-sided dice, with friends. “I covered playing cards with stickers and wrote on them,” he adds. “This was a fun, creative part of the project, coming up with rules and solving problems of game mechanics. My friends might tell you I’d bend and change the rules to ensure my victories, although surely this is a perk of being a game creator! The most surprising thing for me was I found out that I could draw. I always thought it was something I wasn’t any good at, but it was important to me that the players were all designed by me, so I just started practising every day and I managed to come up with some brilliant characters that I’m really delighted with.”

Once he knew Matchday Mayhem had legs, Dan invested in a prototype and is looking for support on Kickstarter: see the Insta page for info. “Any venture of this nature is about taking pride in creating joyous experiences, so primarily, I want to share it with as many people as possible. But I hope it could be a success! Perhaps I could look into the possibility of creating a phone app version, but not getting too carried away with that idea just yet. I’m just hoping I can recoup what I’ve invested and then anything after that would be a bonus.