The Adult Round

One thing about the Eagles' Quarter back Herb Apfel --he's consistent. May be too consistent. Trailing 7-3 last week, with a first down on his own 45-yd. line and only three minutes left, he called four quick sideline passes in a row. An alert Sentinel defense stopped them all; the Eagles had to give up the ball, and with it the championship.

It figured, but wait a minute. Which Sentinels? What championship? Every body knows that the football season ended weeks ago.

Yet there they were last week, the Brooklyn Eagles and the New Haven Sentinels, playing for the title in the dead of winter in just about the unlikeliest stadium imaginable: the dining room of the Fairfield (Conn.) Motor Inn. And on a gridiron that was precisely 1 ft. 7 1/2 in. long and 1 ft. 2 1/2 in. wide.

Complex Strategy. The crowd roared (from a tape recorder) as an announcer called out the plays to a small but fanatical live audience. For all the excitement it could have been Green Bay v. Cleveland. Instead, as a growing number of football widows have been discovering to their dismay, the name of the game is Pro Quarterback, a hot new "adult" game.

The mechanics of Pro Quarterback are simple. They involve cards, dice and a field on which the progress of the ball is marked with wax pencils. The game is best played with two to a side, one calling offense, the other defense. But the strategy is complex. The offensive quarterback picks a card from among five basic runs and five passes, calls it for either his strong or weak side. The defensive captain has three variations of the 4-3-4 defense (tight, deep, normal) and no fewer than six different blitzes. A roll of the dice then helps determine the outcome of the play. And the odds are right; the game was designed with National Football League statistics as the criteria.

Blitzed & Blocked. Pro Quarterback is meant for adults, and they take the game seriously. "My wife thinks I'm crazy," says Eagle Scout Michael Gorsky, 26, an electronics technician who vainly scrutinized Sentinel patterns for a weakness. "This is as much a real game as when the Giants are playing the Colts. Maybe it's more real, since I can play."

Just to get his Eagles to the playoff,

Quarterback Apfel, a 27-year-old accountant for SONY, put in some six hours a week battling 19 other Brooklyn opponents. But nothing he came up against prepared him for the New Haven Sentinels' captain, who had grown sharp in a 14-team league composed of mathematicians, computer programmers and systems analysts employed by the Southern New England Telephone Co. in New Haven.

When he tried an end run round his strong side, the Sentinels called for a blitz by a linebacker and a corner back. A quick opener found the Sentinels up tight; a circle pass was blocked by Sentinels backs waiting in a classic pass defense. The best Apfel could manage was a field goal from the Sentinels' 25-yd. line. It was the kind of a day a quarterback, even if he's only an accountant, longs to forget.

Out of the Clubroom. Pro Quarterback is the brainchild of Tod Lansing, 52, a retired public relations man who reconstructed it from a game he had worked out on graph paper as a boy. Says Lansing: "Any fan feels that if he were a little bit bigger or a little bit faster or a little bit younger-well, then he'd certainly show everyone a thing or two. This is the guy's chance."

The guys are taking it-every chance they have. Sportswriters, stockbrokers and admen are playing Pro Quarterback. College and high school coaches are using it to teach sound signal calling to their quarterbacks. Manhattan's Abercrombie & Fitch sold $32,000 worth (at $8.50 per game) in the three weeks before Christmas alone.

For all that, Pro Quarterback is only one example of an unprecedented new interest in adult games. The bestseller continues to be Monopoly. Backgammon and dominoes, which were long confined largely to male clubrooms, are now being played by both sexes in highly successful charity tournaments from Manhattan to San Francisco. Sets of go, Scrabble and chess are selling briskly.

Cracking the Cranium. The idea behind the newest games seems to be: Make them impossible, or at least interminable. Strategy games such as Diplomacy (TIME, Dec. 13, 1963) often drag on for eight hours, can devour a whole weekend. War games, notably Avalon Hill's Waterloo, Stalingrad and Gettysburg, allow a player to second-guess Napoleon, Hitler or Lee, and, if successful, reverse the course of history.

A surprising success is Wiff'n Proof, a cranium-cracking game of symbolic logic played with 36 lettered dice, which was deviously devised by Yale Law Professor Layman Allen. It is played for its instructional values in junior high schools throughout the U.S. And why not? It's really simple once you know that a WFF (pronounced woof) is a Well Founded Formula and a Proof is, well, a proof. And just in case that isn't clear enough, there are a few written instructions to help out-223 pages of them, to be exact.

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