Hockey Manager: The First Hockey Fantasy Online Game

 HockeyManager is the first, online and free hockey fantasy game. The objective of this game is to create your team using the available players, choose a championship and try to predict the game scores of these real competitions in order to owning the best virtual team. Your team will earn points according to the performance of the real teams and players which compete in several club leagues such as the Belgian, French and Spanish, as well as all major FIH tournaments. The man behind this project is Xavier Pillons.

1. Who are you and how did you came up with this idea?
My name is Xavier Pillons, I’m 48 years old, living in France, and playing hockey since almost 10 years at St Germain Hockey Club (SGHC), one of the largest French club. The idea of this game came from a previous version built in 2006 by SGHC club members on the French championship, it was named Hockeyman. The game was updated manually, and every Sunday evening, the game manager have to spent hours over the phone to get the results. And even if it was a success in the French community, all players were talking about it before their games, and looking at the results on the next Monday, it was too heavy to manage it, so it has ended. 2 years ago with the new president of SGHC, during a bar discussion, we thought it could be a good idea to do it again, in order to provide something new in communication around hockey in France.

2. What motivated you to create this game and what is the current state of the Hockey Manager?
As I’m a software programmer, I took this as a challenge trying to automate as much as possible in order to have very few manual actions. I’ve started with the French championship, and then gradually added new ones, like the main FIH events like the World Cup, Champions Trophy, World League. And then I added Spain, Belgium and the Hero India League. I’m adding regularly new features depending on my free time. There are no fantasy game for hockey and by doing this I think it let my community knowing more about the national teams, the player performances and stats, the competition agenda.

3. What goals do you want to achieve with Hockey Manager?
My goal is to build a large community around the game like what exists for football, and add new national championships for countries like Netherlands, Germany and England. Ideally I would like to get support from the various country federations or even better from the FIH to help promote this free game and platform. I’m also looking for a community manager who could help me as the communication part is taking more and more time, which allows me less time for building new features.

4. What feedback do you get from the participants? Unfortunately I get very little feedback, which is frustrating because I don’t know what participants like or dislike. The only few I’ve got has been from passionate participants which was encouraging. I would like to have a forum which could be the next large new feature. With these worldwide competitions, there are participants all other the world which is exciting.

Register and start playing at the HockeyManager Website