My first few days with Bank Shot Basketball

For some time now, I've been in the market for a full-play college basketball game. I had been a long-time customer of the now-departed Classic College and Pro Basketball, for which I own hundreds of teams purchased over the past 15-20 years, and its demise left a hole in my stable. Specifically, I wanted a full-play game that not only consistently produced current seasons but also had a large library of historical teams; I have a strong tendency towards historical gaming in the first place, and I expect this to only accentuate in the case of NCAAB as NIL and conference realignment move the sport towards one-year playing contracts and the diminution of long-standing rivalries.

With the end of the baseball season and the tip-off of preseason tournaments, I started to get serious about the search. Having seen Dave Gardner's videos showing off Bank Shot Basketball from Sideline Strategy Games, and heard a little bit from S.T. Patrick at Digital to Dice Con 2025 about both the card-making process and the development of the team library, I knew that this was one to which I would have to give a real shot. I've now had a few days with the game and the first three college sets (90 teams ranging in time from 1967 UCLA to 2023 San Diego State, and in program reputation from 1992 Prairie View to 2020 Kansas) and have been able to roll a few games. The first two were played using the ten-man "Simulation" automated substitution mode, and the third using the old "throw five guys out there and manage your own subs, Coach" method. First, here are the game results . . .

1988 Oklahoma (90) at 1986 Maryland (92)

The '88 Sooners are my all-time favorite college basketball team. They lost in the 1988 National Final to Danny Manning's Kansas, but they still hold the NCAA records for the most points and field goals in a season, and rose to national prominence for their high-speed play on both sides of the ball (+10 Pace). They averaged almost 103 points per game on offense and nearly 13 steals per game on defense, with Mookie Blaylock setting both new career and single-game NCAA records for swipes. This Maryland team is largely known for the Len Bias tragedy, but the senior PF was a truly transcendent talent and he had some decent complementary pieces around him on a club that was a #5 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

It was an up-tempo affair from the start, the two clubs running up and down the court, seemingly scoring at will. Bias had a double-double by halftime, but Oklahoma managed to take a slim 55-53 lead into the locker room as legendary coaches Billy Tubbs and Lefty Driesell looked to find ways to stop the bleeding. The defenses stiffened noticeably in the second half and the game went back and forth until the final seconds, as Oklahoma (who got a grand total of ZERO bench points, and had two starters foul out) seemed to be running out of bullets . . . the Terps had the ball for the final possession of regulation in a tie game and, with Bias (33 points, 13 rebounds, but 12-31 shooting) blanketed, Jeff Baxter found Derrick Lewis cutting into the paint for a ten-foot jumper that swished home just before the buzzer. In the end, Oklahoma were doomed by 23 turnovers which helped Maryland accumulate twelve more FG attempts.

1984 Georgetown (42) at 1985 St. John's (45)

I grew up in the Boston area, and the early years of the Big East were pretty formative for me as a college basketball fan - Bouie and Louie, John Bagley, Pearl Washington, Chris Mullin and, of course. Patrick Ewing. Ewing played high school ball in the Boston area and his Cambridge Rindge & Latin team defeated my high school in the state tournament on the way to one of its three consecutive championships; I was there and will never forget the standing-room-only crowd on a neutral floor . . . a crowd so deep that all I could really see was Ewing's hand come up in the air for a dunk every now and then. The 1984 Georgetown team would win the national title over Houston, and then would eliminate Mullin's Redmen in the Final Four the following season.

This game could not have been more different than the first - the defense was stifling, the shooting sub-par, and the scoring hard to come by. The clubs shot a combined 30% from the floor in the opening twenty minutes with the Hoyas holding a 22-18 halftime lead. Things loosened up very slightly in the second half, and Georgetown was still clinging to a 40-39 lead at the final television timeout. But the last four minutes belonged to St. John's - Walter Berry (12 points, 18 rebounds) scored twice and had two big offensive rebounds as the kids from Queens outscored the DC boys 6-2 down the stretch to win 45-42. Ewing scored only nine points, but had eleven boards and three blocks, while Mullin struggled to a 6-22 shooting night and thirteen points.

1991 UNLV (82) vs 1992 Duke (78) - neutral site

The '91 Runnin' Rebels are another of my all-time favorites - I loved to watch Tarkanian's teams play defense (sorry, Jim Boeheim, but this is the best zone defense I've seen in my lifetime) and Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Anderson Hunt were (while not without their weaknesses) incredibly entertaining college players. (Tarkanian was really the guy that started the whole "fill the court with athletic wing players" rage that re-shaped college hoops in the 1990s.) Their Final Four loss to Duke, for their first loss of the season, came as both a surprise and a disappointment at the time and here was a chance to see if they could right what appeared to be a wrong from this fan's perspective. (The 1991 Duke team is not yet available in the BSB catalogue.)

UNLV and Duke line up for the opening tip

This looked to be another up-tempo affair and got off to bright start, with Duke scoring eleven points in the first four minutes to jump in front, but UNLV nudged ahead with 8:00 to go in the half just to see the Blue Devils go on an 11-5 run late in the half to grab a 43-38 edge at the break behind Christian Laettner's 11 points (seven of which came from the free-throw line, a theme that would continue all evening to Tark's chagrin). But Tark had some defensive adjustments ready for the restart, and Duke could only manage seven points in the first eight minutes of the second half as the Rebels shot out to a six-point lead. Coach K countered, of course, and the Dukies went on a run that pulled them into a 65-65 tie with eight minutes to go. It was nip-and-tuck from there, until Larry Johnson (25 points, 10 rebounds) hit a three-pointer over Laettner with three minutes to go to put UNLV up by five, and Johnson scored seven of the last nine Rebel points to hold off the Devils for an 82-78 win. Laettner had 21, and Bobby Hurley had 16 for Duke but also five turnovers against four assists.

Summary

I found the game to be immensely fun to play, and I was literally shouting out loud at the end of the final game as Larry Johnson took over down the stretch. So, thumbs up on the immersion factor. The rules were fairly straightforward and intuitive and I was barely referring to them by my third game, although there were a few edge cases (especially in the ten-man version) that required some reinforcement - what happens if the Action Card refers only to Ball-handling ratings and there are none in the game, the procedure for determining 2P/3P shots on readings from defensive cards, etc. By the end of the third contest, though, I was more or less watching the game and not "the game", if you get my drift, which is a very good sign. The components are incredibly nice - I mostly mean the player cards here, as I didn't use the playing boards and use the Andy Lewis FAC flipper rather than the physical FAC deck - but they are gorgeous. Easy to read, just the right splash of color (but why is San Diego State blue?!), and terrific thick, glossy cardstock that's a pleasure to look at and handle.

Small sample warnings and all of that aside, I found the games to be realistic and believable, and the possession-based engine keeps the game moving along quickly. (Keeping the full stats that you see above I completed the last half of play, only my 6th, in under 40 minutes.) While the ten-man mode is innovative, and does more or less what it says on the tin, I did feel like the reserves were still undersampled and I expect that the system will not fit especially well with teams like 1984 Georgetown where playing time was spread quite broadly (six players averaged more than 20 minutes per game); I also missed making game-relevant substitutions like compensating for foul trouble. You could still do this by moving players back and forth between the starting and reserve slots but, at that point, it seemed like I might as well handle subs manually. Since the game is largely a spectator-type sim (there are some strategy plays, like the press and the stall, which you can use when the situation calls for them), making player substitutions is the primary line of game-player agency.

With all of this going for it, you can expect that I'm going to spend quite a bit of time exploring a growing college library that already spans eighty years of hoops history in the person of more than 400 (!) teams.