Retro Bowl - Football strategy simulation

Find joy in Retro Bowl

Unleash your inner armchair quarterback and lead your team to victory in the ultimate retro football showdown. Show off your coaching skills, manage egos, and dominate the field. Are you ready to win the Retro Bowl?

About Retro Bowl

Graphics and Visual Quality:

Retro Bowl offers a delightful blast from the past with its charmingly retro graphics that will transport you back to the golden days of classic arcade football games.

Gameplay:

Step into the shoes of a coach, make strategic decisions, manage your team's roster, handle press duties, and experience the thrill of calling plays on the field. Every decision counts as you strive for victory in every game.

Free/In-Game Payment:

Retro Bowl is free to download and play, offering hours of fun without breaking the bank. However, for those looking to enhance their experience, there are in-game purchases available to customize and improve your gameplay.

Features:

- Manage your team: From drafting players to handling egos, every aspect of team management is in your hands.

- Strategic gameplay: Call the shots on the field, devise winning strategies, and outsmart your opponents to secure victory.

- Retro visuals: Immerse yourself in nostalgia with the game's retro-inspired graphics that pay homage to classic football games.

- Thrilling challenges: Rise up to the challenge and lead your team to victory in intense matches that will keep you glued to your screen.

- Achievements and rewards: Celebrate your victories with in-game achievements and unlock special rewards as you progress towards winning the Retro Bowl.

Retro Bowl Tips

Focus on accumulating Coaching Credits early on 

When starting a new save file, your biggest limiter is your amount of Coaching Credits — the game’s alternate currency that you can pay real money for if you want to. You’ll accrue these over time, especially the more you win and get your fan rating up. 

Coaching Credits are important because any player you acquire will come with a Coaching Credits cost associated with them, meaning you not only need to make sure you have enough salary cap for them, you’ll need enough of this in-game currency. 

Outside of playing games, you’ll often be faced with press interviews and dilemmas in which you can gain or lose Coaching Credits, boost or lower a player’s or the team’s morale, or please your fanbase. 

The fan rating bar (shown as a percent) is important in the long term because the more you fill it up, the more Coaching Credits after games you will get. But when you start a new file, you’re a long way away from this mattering — you need to be able to win games first, and in order to do that you need enough Coaching Credits to sign star players. 

This might mean opting to save a credit or two in your first seasons at the expense of having a player take a morale hit. In the short term, this is not ideal, but it will put you in a better position to acquire star players, which will better your roster and make it less likely for your team overall to lose morale via losses. 

Don’t tolerate toxic players early on 

If a player’s morale reaches rock bottom, they become toxic, which will negatively affect the whole team if they are allowed to remain on the roster. Early on, when your options for acquiring new players are slim, it might seem OK to tolerate toxic players on your roster to avoid leaving their roster spot from being empty. 

In order to improve a player’s morale, you can meet with them, but it’s costly. In the current version of the game, it costs 4 coaching credits, which is easy enough to pay and get back once you’re a few seasons into your file, but can easily be half your Coaching Credits in Seasons 1 or 2. 

During these early seasons, it’s likely that your player is toxic because they aren’t very good (they’re probably a player you were given by default) or your overall team isn’t very good. Both of which means that any losses are likely to undo the mood change that you paid such a steep price for. 

These type of players will drain your Coaching Credits and will delay your ability to upgrade your roster. Cut them loose before they cause too much trouble. 

Please the fans after you have enough Coaching Credits 

Raising your fans’ approval meter will allow you to earn more Coaching Credits per game, so once you have a good amount of Coaching Credits, pay attention to this meter. It will pay off. 

The best way to do this is by winning games, but certain dilemmas will also allow you to raise it. If you’re close to reaching to another tier (there are three) of fan approval, feed that bar. This is how you stash up credit and unlock the game. 

Accumulate a minimum of 100 Coaching Credits before changing teams 

You can stay with one team for your entire playthrough if you want, but that can be boring. Sometimes it’s fun to start fresh with newly-colored player sprites, or make up some in-game storyline in which you are exploring new horizons as a coach. 

However, even if you pick a team that’s pretty well off, you will probably be lacking on multiple fronts by means of empty roster slots, bad players given to you on roster, and players whose contracts are expiring just as you are taking over. 

Assume any new team you’re taking over is going to be a complete rebuild, and unless you want to rely on the draft slowly but surely like you most likely had to do in your first few seasons, you’re going to want enough Coaching Credits to splurge in free agency in order to be competitive. I’ve found that 100 Coaching Credits have been a safe number to save up before switching teams — it’s usually enough to fully fund a rebuild, and if you’re successful, you’ll earn them back quickly. 

Anything less than that, and you won’t be able to spend in free agency without dangerously depleting your Coaching Credits.