Retro Bowl or 4th and Goal? The Football Games on This Site

Two different kinds of football game

This site has two families of American football games, and they want different things from you. Retro Bowl is a career game. You coach a franchise across seasons and play the offense yourself on game day. The 4th and Goal games are built around a single match, played with the keyboard, which you can start in a few clicks. If you know which of those you want tonight, the choice is easy.

Retro Bowl: the long game

Retro Bowl's league has 32 teams in two conferences of four divisions. The season runs 17 games with one bye week, then the playoffs. Between games you run the franchise: a 3-round rookie draft, free agents, trades until week 8, coordinators, and three facilities (stadium, training and rehab). After each match a reporter asks you questions, and your answers can praise or criticise the team, the fans, the coaches or the officials. Players can also drag you into off-field incidents where you choose to defend or criticise them. Toxic players bring down their teammates after a loss, and cutting them improves team morale.

The game's credits name Simon Read for design and code, @pixelnfl for the art and the Heatley Bros for the music. It is published by New Star Games. The build here runs on this domain, and the career is saved in your browser on this device.

4th and Goal: one match at a time

The 4th and Goal series comes from Glowmonkey, whose site address is written into the game code. This site has five editions: 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026. The 2019 to 2024 editions are browser games built with the Phaser engine. In the 2023 edition, the main menu has a play button, a pick-teams option, a playoff season and an instructions page, and there are separate menus for difficulty and game time. A playbook screen comes up before your plays. On the field that edition reads the arrow keys, WASD and the space bar. The 2026 edition is a Unity build, so it takes longer to load on a slow connection.

Choose 4th and Goal when you want to pick two teams and play straight away. Choose Retro Bowl when you want a season that remembers how the last one went.

Retro Bowl College

Retro Bowl College is listed separately on this site. It uses the same credits as Retro Bowl. Its welcome screen says you are starting your first season as head coach of a college football team rather than a pro franchise. Its achievement list shares many goals with the pro game. If you like the Retro Bowl controls but have finished enough pro seasons, it is the natural next game. It keeps its own save, so a pro career does not carry over.

The rest of the football shelf

The football category also has 2 Minute Football Classic, Touchdowners, American Football Real and Football Legends. Each has its own page with its own write-up and controls. Read that page before you press Play, because none of them shares Retro Bowl's drag-to-throw controls.