Forward of the Eagles’ Divisional sport towards the Rams Sunday, South Avenue board sport cafe Queen & Rook is moving into the soccer spirit with a Blitz Champz competitors on Saturday afternoon.
As an added bonus, Adrienne Smith, the creator of the NFL-licensed card sport — for 2 to 6 gamers, ages 7 and up — shall be on the cafe to show and oversee the match.
Past being a sport inventor, entrepreneur, actor, author, and producer, Smith holds the all-time receiving yards document in girls’s deal with soccer. Presently a large receiver with the Boston Renegades within the Girls’s Soccer Alliance, she has received 4 nationwide championships. She has additionally bagged two gold medals with the U.S. nationwide crew on the Worldwide Federation of American Soccer Girls’s World Championship, through which she scored the very first landing in match historical past with a 52-yard catch and run. Smith additionally has three silver medals as a five-time member of the U.S. girls’s nationwide flag soccer crew.
Her on-field prowess is displayed in a not-so-hidden Easter egg on an vital kind of card in each Blitz Champz deck.
“I’ve bought the perfect arms within the enterprise,” she mentioned. “So yeah, I’m the passing landing card.”
Each of Smith’s mother and father had been academics and, as a self-described “nerdy jock,” making the sport function an academic, math-based instrument was a precedence. Launched in New York public faculties in 2017, the sport is enjoyable and aggressive, in addition to academic.
“Children embrace it, and on the finish of the day they’re similar to, ‘I wish to be the primary participant to attain 21 or extra factors,’ they usually’re not realizing that they’re doing the addition and typically, even multiplication,” she mentioned.
When taking it out of the classroom, Smith wasn’t initially positive what the Venn diagram of soccer followers and tabletop avid gamers seemed like. She was pleasantly stunned to search out there was some overlap: “Magic: the Gathering” and “Dungeons & Dragons” gamers may use it as a method to perceive gridiron terminology, like dashing landing and Hail Mary, whereas soccer followers may benefit from the on-field technique features.
“With Blitz Champz, it was the flexibility for me to permit everybody to expertise the enjoyable, the thrill, the technique of enjoying soccer on the elite degree,” Smith mentioned. “Not everybody can run a four-whatever 40, proper? Not everybody has the perfect arms within the enterprise, however most individuals can play and luxuriate in card video games.”
Although the 100 illustrated playing cards within the enjoying decks — cut up into offense and protection — are functionally the identical, the decks themselves are custom-made and promote all 32 NFL groups (Go Birds!). Smith mentioned that the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs deck is the preferred, normally adopted by whichever groups are doing nicely on the time.
The cardboard illustrations present women and men enjoying each deal with and flag soccer, which was additionally important for Smith when designing the sport.
“I knew — as a Black girl who’s performed soccer everywhere in the world, competed towards and with Japanese gamers, British gamers, French gamers, Russian gamers, et cetera — soccer is for everybody,” Smith mentioned. “I used to be adamant that if anybody picks up a Blitz Champz card sport anyplace on this planet, that they might see themselves within the sport and that they might know that soccer was for them.”
Blitz Champz additionally has digital variations on the cellphone app shops and the sport’s web site.
Variations of the deck doubtlessly tied to the WFL, or flag soccer, forward of its look within the 2028 Olympic Video games in Los Angeles as an occasion for each women and men, are “within the works,” Smith mentioned.
No stranger to Philly sports activities fandom, Smith recalled one of many final instances she was within the metropolis, selling her sport on the PAX Unplugged sport conference in December 2023. It additionally occurred to be the day earlier than the Eagles confronted her favourite crew: the San Francisco 49ers.
“As quickly because the Philly followers heard that I used to be a 49ers fan, oh my gosh, the trash-talking started,” she mentioned. “We ended up successful that sport, thanks very a lot, and it was all in good enjoyable. I believe when Philly followers notice that you’re passionate and also you’re educated about soccer … there’s respect.”
It helps that the cardboard sport she was promoting provides Birds followers the prospect to play out their Philly fandom with pleasure.
“I’m giving them the flexibility to play a sport the place they will speak extra trash. So why wouldn’t an Eagles fan love that?” she mentioned.
Saturday’s Blitz Champz Battle Philly at Queen and Rook runs from 5 to 7 p.m. You’ll be able to register right here and the winner will win $100 and an formally licensed Eagles backpack by S.T.A.B.L.E. Second place will get $75 and third $50.
Hopefully the winner is holding an Eagles deck.