Games Like Sheets of Ice

An event-driven engine built on real hockey analytics

Every game is played out event by event, over 1,000 of them a game: faceoffs, zone exits and entries, rushes and cycles, shot attempts, saves, rebounds, hits, penalties and line changes. How one leads to the next comes from published hockey research and is tuned against real pro numbers: how often an entry becomes a shot, how much more dangerous a rush is than a cycle, where shots come from and how often they go in, how a club plays with a lead, how a shift wears a player down.

Nothing is scripted and no result is decided ahead of time. The score, the standings and every player's season are what those events add up to. Play the same game again with the same lineups and you get the same game, shot for shot.

Deep analysis with real hockey analytics

Every number on every screen is counted from those same events, so the analytics describe hockey that was played.

You can run a club well on your gut, your eye and the traditional stats. The deeper numbers are how you find the edge.

The other clubs play the same game you do

The computer run teams follow the same rules, read players from the same information you see, and get no help when they fall behind. They make their own trades, sign their own free agents, make their own picks and set their own lineups. When one of them beats you to a player, it did it under the same limits you live with.  There are no shortcuts or secret information or processes they can use that you cannot.

You read players, and the read can be wrong

Each player carries 'Our View'; your club's current read of where the player stands and where the player could go, with the evidence behind it and how fresh or thin that evidence is. Potential is a range. Players develop, age and decline, and some of them will not turn into what the read said.  There is no numerical attribute score shown to anyone; just comparatives, statistics, and results.  Just like real life.

Run the hockey year

A league that keeps going

Players retire and their careers go into the record. Awards and All-Star teams are handed out every season. The History screen keeps every past season and the all-time leaders. A career has no end date.

Yours

Buy it once. Updates are free. Your careers are files on your own machine, with no account to make. Every world has a seed number, so the same world can be made again.

Still being built

These are part of the game we are making and are not in it yet: