Just when I thought just about every possible combination of fantasy games had been invented, Roster Slots comes along and has a unique take on fantasy sports. The innovation in Roster Slots is that instead of you drafting your fantasy baseball team yourself, you spin the Roster Slot machine for your player. If you don’t like the players that come up, spin again. However, you only have a limited number of spins, so there is a little bit of strategy involved. Do you lock in a mediocre middle infield to give you more shots at an awesome outfield? The scoring system is pretty standard, although simplified.

What is interesting about Roster Slots is that while it is a new format for drafting and playing fantasy sports, slot machines are so ubiquitous that most people will understand how to play pretty quickly, and Roster Slots will not have to do as much education as most new fantasy sports games tend to have to do.

Currently, Roster Slots is a free game with daily, weekly, average-per-play, and yearly leagues fantasy players can play, so you can spend five minutes on it a day, or five minutes once a week if you so choose. Roster Slots is the kind of fantasy game you would play if you had the itch to field another fantasy team and did not want to spend too much money or go through an entire draft. It makes for a fun little diversion.

In terms of sign-up, Roster Slots has done something very simple and allow players to sign up using their Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, or OpenID account. In other words, everyone should be able to play without having to create a new account, which is often a barrier that stops many people from signing up for new products. While this is common across much of the internet, easy sign-ups like this have not really seeped into the fantasy sports market.

My one complaint about the site is the fact that I had to sign up to play around with the slot machine. I think from a marketing perspective, if I could play around with the slot machine prior to signing up, it would give players a better feel for the game.

If you check out the site, you may want to check out the expert league in which I will be competing. I rarely consider myself a fantasy expert, but I am definitely capable of pulling a lever a few times.

Pickemfirst is a browser plugin that allows you to instantly know if a player mentioned in an article is available in any of your fantasy leagues. A simple color-coded icon will display next to that player’s name indicating that player’s availability. Mouse over that icon and you find out which league plus player news. Currently, Pickemfirst can check on a player’s availability on Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports, My Fantasy League, and a perhaps a few others. In other words, Pickemfirst is scouting out players for you even when you are not thinking about fantasy sports.

I love things that are passive and can be value-added without me having to do anything extra. Pickemfirst fits that description perfectly. Pickemfirst works as a plug-in to your browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer are all supported). So once, you install it, you do not have to do anything else to use it. It becomes really hard to lose a customer.

Asking fantasy players to change their habits is nearly impossible. Asking them to do something just once is about the limit of what you can expect from fantasy players. There inlies the beauty of Pickemfirst, since other than installing the application, nothing else has to be done. In fact, it takes less effort to keep using it than to uninstall and stop using it. Pickemfirst could have created a website that culled all of this information together for fantasy players, but that would have required you to check the site on a daily basis. That would never work. This model works perfectly. Pickemfirst has hit it on the head for something that I didn’t even think needed to exist until I saw it

The downside of Pickemfirst is that you may realize that you do not want to know the status of every single player in your fantasy league, and may get tired of those little icons next to each player’s name. I suspect that most people will probably get used to just like we have gotten used to those little talk bubbles indicating a link next a site’s name.

Below is an embed of Pickemfirst’s demonstration video, which does a very good job of summarizing the product:

Maintaining a fantasy baseball team throughout a season is a very laborious task, which is one of the reasons fantasy football has become a much more popular sport (since its so much simpler). With its new game, BlitzPick Baseball is trying to make playing fantasy baseball with your friends just a little bit easier. Each week, a new challenge is issued to league members, where they select one of five players at each position to be on their team. One more important thing, BlitzPick Baseball is played completely within Facebook.

League commissioners have the option of using BlitzPick’s recommended settings or can create their own custom challenges. The ability to create the custom leagues can lead to some hilarity–all-convict week anyone? More importantly, it gives league runners the ability to customize the league to the league participants and keep the names as familiar as possible, which helps participation!

Playing with friends is always the best way to keep a fantasy league interesting. By tapping into the built-in social network of Facebook, BlitzPick has made it easier for fantasy players to sign-up their friends (it’s just a few clicks that most Facebook users should be used to making) and get thriving fantasy league. Further, by building BlitzPick on top of Facebook, it is able to take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook, with wall postings and alerts visible to non-BlitzPickers.

There is definitely a market for much more casual fantasy games that appeal to (potential) fantasy players. The number one reason I hear from people about why they do not play fantasy baseball is that it too hard and takes too much time. Blitzpick has created a game that can be played in five minutes and leaves the fantasy player with a slate of players to root for each week. That is something just about anyone can stomach.

BlitzPick is the brainchild of Chris and Becky Carella, who have formed Super + Fun to launch their new game. Becky is an experienced social game developer, while Chris is an Emmy award-winning producer and game designer. The two of them definitely have the street credentials in order to launch a successful social media game.

The only question that remains to be answered is, “Can they successfully launch a social fantasy sports social media game?” I would like to wish the best of luck as they attempt to find out.

Picklive just announced the closing of a seed round of funding from investors, including from Last.FM backer Stefan Glaenzer. Picklive is a London based start-up that is offering a mix between the nanogaming that LiveHiveSystems is offering and the daily fantasy games you can find at places like SnapDraft.

I like Picklive’s take on creating a real-time fantasy sports game. Instead of predicting the outcome of every pitch or play, in Picklive’s system you compete against other players where each player selects three players, and teams score fantasy points according to their threesome’s performance in that ten minute window. For that ten minutes, fantasy players just have to worry about their team, not every play. For a sport like soccer where the clock rolls continuously, this affords fantasy players the opportunity to play eight or nine games within just one soccer match, or just one, if they so choose.

The site was originally called Football3s, but the site changed its name to Picklive to indicate that it thinks this model can work for more than just fantasy soccer. I can easily see inning-by-inning versions of the game available for fantasy baseball and quarterly versions for fantasy football.

In-game fantasy sports is still a growing niche, and its viability and profitability is still in question. I think Picklive’s simplicity gives it an advantage, because it does not seem like as big a commitment. You only need to pick three players and then let them play. You do not have to watch every pitch or down in order to compete. It is not as big a commitment.

Living a healthy life is difficult, especially if you spend countless hours in front of computer playing and writing about fantasy football. You might have noticed that those jeans that used to be your fat jeans are now the jeans that fit you the most comfortably these days. It is official, you need to get out more. But, since you like playing fantasy sports, there is a solution that you will make it easy and you will love–Fantasy Healthball. Fantasy Healthball provides a scoring system for you to translate your healthy actions you take each week into fantasy points. Then, you can use those points to compete against an opponent that week.

The key to finding a good exercise program is something that you understand, can get comfortable with, and will stay fresh for you every week. If you are used to trying to squeeze every last point out of your fantasy football team, then this will be a very simple concept for you to grasp. There are numerous physical activities such as working out that score you points, but also simple good healthy lifestyle things like drinking enough water each day that will score you points. While weight loss is probably a likely positive side effect, you can do this just to live a healthier life.

Personally, I think the best application for this is for a group of friends to form a league and compete against each other. Staying fit now becomes a game and a contest against each other. You are now in control of how well your fantasy team does, and you can get as many points as you choose. I like to think its similar to why the Wii is so popular, because people are physically involved in how well they do. With Fantasy Healthball, it is impossible to draft a team of duds. But, most importantly, the best part, you do not have to worry about a first round pick stinking up the joint (I’m looking at your LT and Westbrook).

This is a great application of the fantasy sports model applied to something completely unrelated.

In all of this March Madness, one site has peaked my interest a bit. It was TweetBracket. TweetBracket is a test application for 140Bets who is building a platform to allow users to make binary selections, have the information tweeted out (optional), and then have it seamlessly track all of your picks against those of your friends. For the NCAA tournament, 140Bets has set-up a demonstration with TweetBracket in which users select which team they think will win, and 140Bets does the rest. To make it interesting, it is providing prizes like HDTVs and a trip to the 2011 Final Four.

Daily and simple fantasy sports are one of the larger growth markets in the fantasy industry right now(Fanball and NBC Sports‘ SnapDraft has already paid out over $2M in prizes). 140Bets’ approach is the most interesting, because it is building on top of an established platform like Twitter makes the game easily accessible to millions, easy to play, and could potentially benefit from the viral growth that social networks can have. While TweetBracket is just a technology demonstration, but I like to think that it gives us an idea that there just might be a number of different ways to play fantasy sports in the future.

Other sites, such as FanDuel, are already exploring fantasy games played on Twitter, so TweetBracket is not unique. However, the fact that everything is heavily integrated with Twitter is truly remarkable. TweetBracket players just have to log into their Twitter accounts and they are good to go. That’s a really nice feature. Something more sites need to do (or use Facebook Connect). 140Bets’ games are much more like an extension of Twitter than its own site.

What are your thoughts on the direction that 140Bets is taking?

What is easily the largest prize for any fantasy horse racing game, Derby Dreamer has unleashed its game that allows fantasy players to create fantasy stables that could be worth $10,000 a month. For an entry fee of $12 per stable, fantasy players select 18 horses and five jockeys to ride for their stable. Then, stables accumulate points depending on how well their jockeys and horses perform. The stable with the most points each month wins $10,000. As an added bonus for March, the monthly winner will receive two box seat tickets for the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks in May. Each stable is good for a year entry, so that

From a game play perspective, each month the slate is wiped clean, and everyone has an equal shot at competing for the monthly $10,000 prize. In other words, fantasy players get to compete in 12 separate contests for $10,000. I really like this because it should help limit the amount of stables that drop out throughout the season. Further, stables are able to seamlessly join the action since there is no “begin” or “end” of the season. Instead, you just start competing in the month that a fantasy player enters the competition.

With a top prize of $10,000, Derby Dreamer is likely to get a lot of attention for these prizes. Having a large prize brings in a certain amount of shock value and is likely to help drive sign-ups. For long-term viability, if Derby Dreamer is able to create a fun player experience, it may eventually be able to turn this a very profitable niche game.

From the look at the leaderboard right now, Derby Dreamer does not have a ton of sign-ups, so you might have good odds of winning in the next couple of months. If you like horse racing and/or large fantasy sports prizes, saddle up and head over to Derby Dreamer.

The concept of simulated fantasy games is new, but Yesteryear Fantasy Sports has put a new twist on the game. To play, draft a roster of historical players and play head-to-head like regular fantasy football game. However, for your players’ game statistics, YesterYear’s Fantasy Football’s system will randomly select real statistics from a three-year window of that player’s career. The game is free to play if you want an autodrafted team, or $3.99 if you would like to select your own team. Currently, YesterYear is hosting a challenge in which the top teams will get a chance to compete NFL greats like Mike Ditka (Da Bears!), Tony Dorsett and Dwight Clark.

I am not sure what I think about this game, since you know exactly how well your players will perform. The more I think about it, while in theory you will know, it is possible that a player will have all of his big games in one season or could have all of his bad games in a season. In other words, your players could still be total studs or duds, just like regular fantasy football.

Simulated games are not a new concept. YesterYear competes with other simulated games like WhatIfSports, which has been offering siumulated games for a number of years. Heck, simulated games go way back to the card and dice game with things like APBA Baseball and Strat-O-Matic. Personally, I am a fan of simulated games.

The best thing that YesterYear Fantasy Sports has done is framed this as a continuation of fantasy football season. In fact, it seems to avoid words likes “simulated,” as they imply something much geekier and less cool.

Good news is that a part of the proceeds go to the Gridiron Greats fund, which supports retired football players from when football players did not make mountains of money.

Additional Information

http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/64861/
• YesterYear Fantasy Challenge Kicks Off New Season in Fantasy Sports (Press Release)

With the races that lead to the Kentucky Derby, WinStar Farms announced the launch of its Fantasy Derby contest. Fantasy players create a stable of 15 horses and earn points as the horses earn money in the run-up to the Kentucky Derby. The games runs from February 13 to April 17, which is when the run-up to the Kentucky Derby occurs.

The winner of the fantasy derby receives roundtrip airfare and accommodations for two to the 2010 Kentucky Derby plus tickets to the Kentucky Derby itself (you’ll have to bring your own floppy hat, though). The top ten players will receive prizes from WinStar. This fantasy game is not likely to have a ton of entries, so even if you are not a horse racing expert, you may be able to get yourself up to speed and win some cool prizes.

One of the coolest prizes I have ever seen for a fantasy game is the ability to name one of WinStar’s horses. WinStar Farm is farm for horse racing and thoroughbred horses. I like it when fantasy games provide prizes that are unique to their sport or to the company sponsoring the game.

Congratulations to WinStar Farms on its new game and good luck on its launch.

That’s Kerplookee, as in the sound a golf ball makes when it drops into the cup after a well-executed putt. Kerplookee is also a new fantasy golf site with a fantasy golf game. It’s a simple salary cap game where you get $20 million to spread across as many as ten golfers. Score points based on how well your golfers finish in the money.

Kerplookee has an interesting strategy for the start of its game. It started play in the first weekend of January, but those are practice rounds. The game officially starts on February 11. It allows for fantasy players to get used to the game before the start of the season. The downside is that players may drop-off before the season actually starts. The free game is broken into sessions that gives fantasy players a fresh start every few weeks. In addition, Kerplookee also has a pay fantasy game planned that will kick off with the Masters in April.

According to founder Chuck Fridinger, the site has signed up over 500 members since its launch in December and that over 96% of players are actively playing. With a few more promotion events planned, he expects to have a strong number of sign-ups by the time its season starts.

Congratulations to Kerplookee on its launch, and good luck to it as it navigates the fantasy waters.