Bowl Bound College Football

Been playing this game for close to 2 decades now. Honestly it can be as deep or as simple as you want it to be. I tend to let my Coordinators handle gameplan duties, which makes picking your coaching staff pretty important. When it comes to the actual games, I handle the offensive playcalling and let my DC handle the defensive calls.

I have always loved this game and I recommend it for sure but it is not for everyone and I understand that.

Perfect little game to simulate your college fantasies. More in depth than games such as NCAA and the charm of being more hands off on the game itself is interesting. A decent amount of mod support helps as well.
Any college football fans can easily get lost in this game.

Bowl bound college football, the game where you lose as the #23 team to a team and you climb up 3 spots in the top 25 anyway as if you won.

10/10 would climb up the top 25 by losing.

it wont ever let me load up a league that i changed stuff around on and saved it with a new name i go to load game and it says some dang error and thats it lost everything...

It is a great game. I have played it for a number of years and it still holds a very strong interest. Suggest to join one of the many online leagues

Great game when it works. The problem I have is that after two season the game will crash and my save file will show up but be unable to load since it apparently lacks data. It makes any long term play impossible.

I wanted to like this game.

However, after the third time in a row I got to the postseason; only to have the game freeze, and delete my save, I had to warn people about this. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the game three times, made sure all my updates had been made, and the game still doesn't work. Three strikes, and you're out. (Should I have used a football anology? Maybe I'm punting.)

Apparently, there is a fix on the Greydog forums. They think. Guess which one of the downloads you need to fix the problem, and you might be rewarded with a working game!

I've been getting GreyDog games since Extreme Warfare Revenge came on board, and they're very ambitious in scope. In terms of trying to get the most complete sim experience possible, no one does it better. Except in application. A common problem in their games is one of the following:

1) The game is so complicated in its ambitions that you have to get a dozen game overs, read their boards, and watch experts play the game on Youtube to figure out what do in order to succeed. I like games like that, but your mileage may vary.

2) The game crashes, freezes, or just doesn't work as intended. Instead of downloadable patches, that automatically upload via Steam, I have to go to their site and guess which patch fixes my game. This isn't the only Greydog game I've had this happen with.

Is it a better sim than Madden, WhatifSports or NCAA14? Definitely.

Does it need more tutorials, better interfaces, and far, far more stable game play? YES.

Slight recommendation to avoid, with the caveat that IF they patch out the problems, it's a good game. So much so, that I'm going to go back and try a fourth season, just to see if it crashes again.

Ther is so much about this game I love. At first, about 3 seasons, I had the computer run alomst all operations of the game, I only played the weekly games as coach. This worked fairly well, but soon I wanted to learn more. I watched a few videos showing how to play the game (can be found by clicking the link found i the User Guide [?] at the top of the menu).
I started to take control of the Recuiting. It has now become my favorite part of the game. One warning, it's very heart breaking to recruit a player who in the last moment goes elsewhere. My first season of recruiting was not very success. I could bearly get anyone who was Average. The second year I picked up 2 Five Stars and about 4 Four Star players. I went from having about 109th Recruiting Rating to (4 seasons later) being 39th. I rarely play (manually) more than 3 series of play before I Exit the game and let the Sim game take over.

The main thing I don't like, or I should say, the one thing that frusters me, is how the gome figures the Weekly Ratings work. I have reached #1-#4 several times, Win a big game (over 20 points) and drop from #1 to #3 that week. HOW? I one time was in the top 4 the week before the Conference Championship game -- I had an undeafeded season, my championship oppenent had 1 loss, the 2nd place team in my devision also had 1 loss, but not a conference loss).
I won the Championship game 52-21. I dropped (?) from 4 to 7. WHAT?? The team that finished 2nd in the division rose from 6 to 2nd and didn't play. Since my team had play the last game of the season before the Nationals, I was OUT of the Championship (working with the Top 4 play for the Championship). The team which came in 2nd to mine, was 2nd and made it!!! I had the ONLY Undeated team in the nation, a d had defeated 5 teams ranked in the top 25 at the time I played them (6 if yount the championship conference game), 3 fell out before or at the end of the season and I had a 2-0 Top 25 record. I played a top 4 Bowl game and won, but watched lesser teams play in the tournement for the National Championship. The final Pol place my team #2, behind the National Champion.
I decided at that moment to go to a 16 team tournement league. I knew I could place in the top 16 every year. I am in my 5th season of this sytle and have 3 National championship wins. I have ranked as low as 8th and at the last season I ended at #3.

I woiuld like the ability to "talk" to players who are leaving my program for another college. I had an Above Average QB I recruited. I decided to Redshirt him hos Freshmen year because I had "Blue" QB, who actually play 4 years. His 4th, the "recruits" 1st, and I knew the new guy would not get much play time this year. So by redshirting him, I migh get 3 good seasons from him (expecting him to turn pro after his Jounior season). Instead he decide to transfer at the end of the 1st year. His card said he was frusterated (for most the year) because he felt he was lied to about play time. I beleive if there were a way to "talk" to players planning to transfer before they decide to do so, might save me a few players. In this case: had he "aproached" me that he wanted to transfer because of "lack of play time" and I had the option to say, I plan to start you next season", which I was, he may decide to stay.

Old, old game that is still buggy as heck. Great ideas here... weak application.
The worst game-breaking bug tends to overwrite all of your prior save game files so when your game crashes (not if) your prior backups are all corrupted too and you have to start all over again... and again! Even the games own tech support forums have no clue how to fix the constant (and numerous) runtime errors.

Bought this on sale for $5.... still felt cheated :(

I have very mixed opions on this game. Part of me really wants to love it, but there's also the more practical side that says it's perhaps the worst game in my steam collection. I am a huge sports management sim enthusiast, and as such I picked this game up a long time ago expecting a game on the level of front office football, but not quite as polished as OOTP Baseball. I was disappointed to find that the game simply doesn't work. As such I moved on rather quickly from it. I have since came back to it and I have been able to get it working enough to give it a throrough review.

PROS

- Recruiting, gameplanning, setting schedules, and the simulation engine itself are all very good.
- The UI is solid in terms of its looks, but could use polish.

I'll be honest with you, the first point above is the big one. without those things being accurate the game would be bad whether it worked or not. Now on to the elephant in the room.....

GAMEBREAKING CONS

- Frequent crashes that REQUIRE a computer restart to play the game again
- Multiple errors, including one where I had to start a new save file after 30 seasons at my school
- Extremely small text (on my display I had to change the resolution down to be able to read it)

MINOR CONS (Could easily be overlooked)
- Offensive styles are outdated and do not include the spread offense
- Coach hiring is frustrating. If you do not get the guy you target you automatically receive a heap of trash to replace him.
- Some of the conferences don't schedule rivalries correctly (Purdue doesn't play IU every year, but they DO face Notre Dame yearly)

FINAL THOUGHTS

The game simply doesn't work. In my experience, every 2 hours this game crashes like clockwork. It happened even more frequently until I realized running as an administrator would help. It wouldn't be as bad if you didn't have to restart your computer every time this thing crashed. Imagine if you bought a bike, and every time you drove any distance greater than 10 miles all the tires fell off. You would have to stop, put them back on, and then proceed to ride.But that isn't enough! In order to get the tires back on again you MUST walk back to where you started and then you can ride again. Pretty annoying right? My point exactly.

I want this game to be good, and I hope that the developer will listen to the concerns myself and many, many others have raised. The combination of it being out of date, and quite unstable makes it hard to reccomend to anybody. Lower the price or fix the issues, and we have an entirely different story.

I would not recommend this game. I am a fan of all types of sports management/simulation games and this game is actually pretty decent. My issue however is the game has constant crashing issues and other glitches. 6 weeks into my first year, the game decided to stop simulating my team's games. The game was able to simulate each week but never actually simulated my games.

Now if you do want to play this game, be prepared to save after you advance the game each time. I have been the victim of many crashes which has set back tons of progress I've made in some of my saves. I have tried multiples fixes including: uninstalling and re-installing, launching as Administrator from the Local Steam Folder, verifying the integrity of the game cache, etc. Nothing has resolved the issue of constant crashes, generally in the offseason, which is when you will constantly be needing to save as there are many weeks in the offseason.

The game itself is fun and has a decent simulation engine that produces good stats and scores. However, the technical issues have made this game unplayable for me and I cannot recommend anyone purchase this unless you like to take chances.

First - the 2015 release date on the Store page is when it was released on Steam. The game is actually much, much older. Sure, it had a small udpate where the developer added the college playoff framework, but the when they made that update, they didn't address a number of others, to include technical issues.

Now, some folks may not have any issues. Others (you can see in their reviews, forum posts, online searches) experience a crash after playing it for a bit. I'm one of those who seems to get about 2-3 hours of play before it crashes. And by crash I mean freeze, unresponsive with it apparently sucking the life out of the computer so you have to kill it manually. Not the end of the world in some cases, however, some folks when this happens, finds that even after the game is closed, that their operating system begins acting strangely, with odd errors. I'm also one of those, adn the odd errors are things like Windows Explorer failing when I right click on an object, and somethings refusing to launch without a restart of the computer (to include the game itself).

I first thought it was a simple memory leak, but my RAM tools tend to show nothing wrong. Even worse, I enjoyed it enough that I figured I'd just deal with restarting my computer every few hours. Now, after the last crash, restarting my computer isn't getting rid of the oddities at all. The only thing that has triggered this behavior is this game. My only guess is it's a game that the method in which it was written, doesn't run well on current computers, although it could have been like this for years, as I've found others, with no solid fixes, who have mentioned the same issue and who've sought and seem to not have found an adequate resolution.

So, it's fun if you like simulators. It's not the most accurate, and parts of it are both vague and seemingly broken, but it was really scratching my itch for what I was looking for. I just can't recommend it though, as if you're really jonesing for it, you'll likely buy it anyway, but if you're semi-interested for a time killer - don't do it, as you could be making headaches for your computer.

As it is, it has gotten bad enough for me that I've uninstalled it. So, buyer beware if you decide to go for it.

Tried four times to get through a full season with no luck. There's a fun (if a bit clunky) game under there, but there are all sorts of technical holding it back. You might get away with an arcade game that repeatedly messes with your progress, but for a text sim, it's a one-way ticket to being uninstalled.

I bought this game couple of years ago, and spent hours and hours with it. I saw it on sale a week ago, and it was a must buy. We, as GDS fans, must support the guys!

BBCF is a text based sports simulation game about College Football, and its the very best out there. Of cours, there are no license for the teams, but you can edit them or you can download mods. You can chose all Division 1 football programs, take charge of recruiting, call plays during a game, hire & fire staff members, budget of the program and scheduling. If your best Quarterback is bad at school, you can give him a few extra lessons to be good off and on the turf. If you like text sims like OOTP, TEW, WMMA you will like BBCF, too.

Randomly freezes or crashes on a regular basis (like hourly) which require a restart (of the computer - not the game). The crashes actually screw up your computer, interfering with functions like copy&paste, which is pretty unheard of and hints at how badly it is coded. There are some things to like, but ultimately there are far too many problems in multiple areas to recommend, including severe stability issues and an atrocious interface. The game has been around for a while, so there's probably not much chance of significant improvement.

Maybe if this game was on sale for 75% off, it'd be worth it.. But it's not worth $20. Very in depth, but it's like the devs focuses so hard on making it in depth, they forgot to make simple game mechanics and smart AI.

Example, #4 Ohio State vs. #5 Alabama.. Final score, OSU- 34 ALA-10... OSU moves down to the #5 spot somehow.
Next week: a bye for OSU.. Move down to #7
Next week: #7 OSU vs. #14 Wisconsin.. Final score, OSU-50 WIS-21.. OSU moves down to #9.

How the fuck does that happen???????

I'm a huge CFB so I was thrilled when I came across this game, but, despite making every effort to love the game, I just don't.

The main issue for me is the instability; the game crashes at least a couple of times in each session (which, tbf, is normally 3+ hours) and sometimes even deletes your saved game for no apparent reason. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating.

The UI isn't always particularly user-friendly either; I spend most of my time during the recruiting section of the game flicking back and forth between my (in-game) emails and the recruiting screen to follow advice which is in said emails, making an otherwise enjoyable aspect of the game tedious and grindy. Simply populating the player info screen with suggested recruit pitches after scouting, rather than slowly growing adding to them week on week, would be a quick fix here. Similarly, full information on player injuries isn't available in your depth chart, so you have to flick back and forth between emails and depth chart to update the position of players who are fit to play but haven't fully recovered. If you could get the medical staff report either in the player info screen or simply by hovering over their name in the depth chart I would save a fair bit of time. There's more on this but I won't drone on.

Finally, calling the plays in a game can be very hollow and frustrating at times, not because this is a text-based sim, but because there is no kind of play-by-play feedback or general analysis to explain why a certain play is/isn't working, making play-calling fairly arbitary as long as you stay within the confines of common sense. A simple pop-up from the relevant co-ordinator explaining in more detail what happened on each play would help give a clearer picture of why a play succeeded/failed and help to make more informed decisions later on.

There are things I do love about the game, like the subject matter and the fact that it even exists. I've had some really enjoyable moments when playing and there's a real sense of satisfaction from building your team's prestige and attracting better recruits as the seasons wear on. Unfortunately that just isn't enough to keep me coming back for more agonising crashes and motonous offfseason tabbing. While it would be foolish to expect the kind of polish you would expect from a game like Football Manager, given the difference in budget and price, I would have hoped for a slicker overall product. If the issues I mentioned above are fixed then I will come back to this game in a heartbeat, but until then I'll just content myself with watching CFB.

If you are missing the dynasty aspects of the NCAA series, this is the game for you. While it currently still harbors some techinical problems, it is still a solid game.

Pros
+ In depth stats
+ Ability to structure custom playbook
+ Original BCS NC, 4 team, or 16 team playoff options
+ Academic suspensions
+ Shifting conferences
+ Setting of depth chart and CPU in-game strategy

Negatives
- Basic coaching options
- Occasional game crashes
- Over-simplfied recruiting

The game can be as simple or in depth as you want. You can play an entire season in 20 minutes or several hours. The recruiting is good overall, however it feels a little bland at many times. But offseason activities are far better than any college dynasty game I have seen before. If you enjoyed OOTPB or Football Manager, this will feel a little more shallow as it isn't at that level yet. But it is a solid addition to manager sims and is worth playing if you are a college football fan

This game is a really great simulation of collge football. The only thing that currently holds it back is that the game was released right before the huge change over to all of the various spread option formations and philosophies that now exists in college football circa 2006. It is good that the developer is now beginning to provide updates to the game once again and hopefully this will be added in the near future.

That being said I have heard some in the community for this game say that a new game is needed. The engine for the game is actually quite good and truthfully if they would provide an update that would make this game more comparable to current day college football I think really that would be all that would be needed to bring excitment back to this game. The current price tag for the game at $14.99 is definitely worth the price but just that one update would in my opinion bring about not only more sales but excitment back to the game once again.

I have had this game for several years, and have spent countless hours on it. This is a text based sports sim, and the best one out there on college football. Basically you run a D1 football program. You are in charge of recruiting, the budget, hiring and firing coordinators and you can call plays during the games if you would like to. The game even gives you some latitude on scheduling and player training. If you are looking for an arcade game this is not for you, but if you like deep text based sports sim, this would be a good one for you to check out.