Hattrick (video game): Difference between revisions

See hat-trick for the generic term meaning

Hattrick is an online, browser-based, football management game (MMOG) based and created in Sweden.

This game can be found at hattrick.org

Currently the community is made up of 106 leagues and more than 700,000 managers and their teams from all over the world. There is a huge worldwide community built around the game, which collects statistics and talks about the game on message boards, for example.

After a short registration period, the user receives a team. Nearly always, the newbie takes over someone's old, defunct team, and the team's position in the league structure with an initial set of players, a weak coach, a small stadium, fanclub, and staff. The player is then free to manage his or her squad, sell and purchase the players, define a training scheme, and so forth. If the player is successful enough to win their league, he or she is granted promotion to a higher league the next four-months-long season, sometimes by automatic promotion but more often via a playoff game with a team that finished in the qualification zone in a league above.

Hattrick is completely free to play. The normal service includes the ability to change the training type, hire and fire your staff, buy and sell players, set your lineup for the match, invest in a youth squad, and run the club as an owner of a football club would. As with any manager game, the player must assign positions to the players and some basic tactical and strategic options.

Hattrick is always under development, and the game developers are constantly adding new features to the game and enhancing the current ones. These additions, and proposed ideas, are usually accompanied by heated debate in the game's conferences - a recurring topic is whether the top teams should be invited to a Champions League-style tournament, which as of 19 December 2005 has been implemented in the form of the Hattrick Masters.

Hattrick's leading leagues in terms of user numbers are Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Argentina and Switzerland, although countries such as Poland, Denmark, Finland, Romania, Israel, Colombia and Germany are growing quickly.

Hattrick also offers a 'Supporter' feature that allows additional customization. The customization options include designing the arena, assigning numbers to your players, and designing a logo. With the Supporter add-on, the game also offers the ability to join various message board groups called 'federations.' A federation is designed to allow aligned Hattrick players with common interests to share newsletters and a message board and organize friendly cups. Federations provide a place to talk about chosen topics away from the main forum boards.

There are many third party softwares available to help and enhance the user's gaming experience, although many users debate whether or not these detract from the skill of the game, such as match viewers and team administrators. Third party software that retrieves information from the Hattrick site needs to be approved by the Hattrick Developers.

Hattrick has inspired a cricket game called Battrick that is based on similar principles and currently offers a 50-over ball-by-ball commentary for all league games. League games are played on a Friday. It is envisaged that multi-day gameswill be offered in future seasons. International squads have just been launched after a set of elections for each country. Hattrick also caused the creation of many other football manager games, like GiveNGo, FootieManager, and Freekick.

• Hattrick: http://www.hattrick.org
• Hattrick Wiki: http://wiki.hattrick.org
• Extralives: http://www.extralives.com
• OMGN Review