By Ryan Parker · Why squares win on game day
There are a lot of ways to make a football game more interactive. Fantasy leagues, prop sheets, bracket challenges, and plain old trivia all have their place. But for a party, office event, or group gathering, football squares has some advantages that the others cannot match.
Fantasy football is great if you follow the NFL closely, have time to draft a team, and enjoy managing your roster week after week. But it is a terrible party game. It requires significant knowledge, a season-long commitment, and excludes anyone who is not already into football.
Squares require none of that. You click a square, type your name, and you are done. No research, no drafts, no waiver wire. The game resolves in a few hours, and everyone from die-hard fans to people who cannot name a single player has equal odds of winning. For a single-game event like the Super Bowl, squares is the clear winner.
Prop sheets (lists of predictions like "Who will score first?" or "Will there be a safety?") are fun and popular at Super Bowl parties. They work well for people who enjoy sports trivia and predictions.
The downside is that prop sheets reward sports knowledge, which means the person who watches football every week has a big advantage over the person who is just there for the commercials. Squares level the playing field completely. Also, prop sheets require someone to grade every answer at the end, which is tedious. Squares determine winners automatically based on the score.
That said, there is no reason you cannot do both. Run a squares game alongside a prop sheet and let people participate in whichever one appeals to them.
Bracket challenges are perfect for tournaments like March Madness where you are predicting outcomes across multiple games. They are a different kind of fun than squares because they reward prediction skill and play out over weeks.
Squares are better for single games. If you want to add excitement to one specific matchup, a squares grid is the way to go. For a tournament, you can run both: a bracket challenge for the full tournament and individual squares games for the biggest matchups. Our college basketball squares page has more on how to set this up.
A simple way to compare game-day activities: how much attention do they demand while the actual game is on? Trivia needs a host reading questions during commercial breaks. Prop sheets need someone tracking thirty different outcomes and settling arguments about whether the coin toss counts as heads if it bounces. Fantasy pulls people into their phones to check a different game entirely.
Squares asks for attention exactly four times, at the end of each quarter, and each check takes five seconds: look at the two last digits, find the square, cheer or groan. The rest of the time everyone just watches the game together, which is supposedly the point of the party. That low overhead is why squares survives at gatherings where more demanding games quietly get abandoned by the second quarter.
The reason football squares has been the go-to game day activity for decades comes down to a few things. It is inclusive, meaning anyone can play regardless of sports knowledge. It is fast, taking less than a minute to set up and participate. It creates ongoing excitement through the game because winners are determined at the end of each period, not just at the end. And it is social, giving people something to talk about and root for together.
No other game day activity checks all of those boxes. For a deeper dive into the history and staying power of the game, check out our History of Football Squares page.
Create a free football squares game and try it at your next event.
Create Your Game →Ryan Parker
Ryan builds and runs OnlineFootballSquares.com, and has been organizing squares games for family gatherings and office parties for years — which is exactly why the site exists. He personally answers every support email. Questions or corrections? Get in touch.