Help and frequently asked questions

No. Open the site and play. A guest gets a random ID and a record of their runs on this device, and that is all we hold. Guests can post to the daily board and to challenge scoreboards under a display name they pick at the moment they post.

Signing in is for keeping things. Your runs, your streak, your coins and your GM Card follow you to any device, and nothing you did as a guest is lost: when you sign in, your guest history merges into the account.

Neither one is ranked, so neither posts to a board. The difference is what counts toward your GM Card. Play runs count: they feed your last-10 form, your record book, your banners and your standing in The Field. Practice counts nowhere, ever, and there is no limit on how many practice runs you take.

Use Practice to learn a roster or try a wild idea. Use Play when you want the result on your card.

Spins are seeded on our server and drawn from 185 regular team-and-decade buckets, so a repeat is uncommon but not impossible. There is a mild anti-repeat: a franchise you just drew is set aside for the next spin or two, as long as enough buckets still hold a player who fits one of your open slots.

Late in a run, when only a goalie slot is open, fewer buckets qualify and the anti-repeat has to stand down. That is when a repeat is most likely, and it is the same for everyone playing that seed.

A skater needs at least 10 games with that franchise in that decade to make the sheet; a goalie needs 5 starts. Below that there is not enough to rate. A player who cleared the bar but barely, under 40 games for a skater or under 20 starts for a goalie, is marked cameo so you know the line rests on a small sample.

“est.” means part of the card rests on a statistic the league did not record yet in that player’s seasons, such as save percentage or plus-minus in the early decades, so we estimated it from what was recorded. The card is still fully playable; the mark is there so you know.

Yes. Your spins and picks are saved on your device, and the home screen offers Resume run when you come back. A run stays open for 30 minutes of drafting, and you have 24 hours from the start to submit it. After that the session expires and you start a new one.

Ranked daily and challenge attempts follow the same clock, so do not start today’s spins if you are about to lose signal for a day.

At 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, every day. Everyone gets the same six spins for the day, and the daily screen counts down to the next set. Your first attempt on today’s spins is your ranked one: it posts to the board and counts toward your streak. Any later attempt on the same spins is practice and changes nothing.

Play a ranked daily on consecutive days and your streak grows by one each day. Miss a day and it resets to 1 on your next daily; your best streak is kept and shown on your GM Card. Seven days in a row pays 50 coins and thirty days pays 250, each awarded on the day you reach it.

If you played as a guest and then sign in, the two streaks merge and the higher one wins.

After any run you can share it as a challenge. Your friends get a short code of letters and digits, or a link that carries it, and it hands them your exact six spins: same teams, same eras, only the picks are theirs. Each person gets one official try that posts to the scoreboard. Your own replays of your spins are practice and never touch the board.

The scoreboard is a public URL, so anyone with the link can open it. The landing page shows your record and six team-colour dots for your picks, with no player names, so nothing is spoiled before they draft.

Past dailies cannot be replayed. Each day has one set of spins and one board, and when the day rolls over it is closed. What you keep is your history: your GM Card shows your last 10 runs in detail, a 30-run trend, your record book and every banner you have earned. Tap any run on the card to reopen its full result.

Three things are usually going on. First, the six you drafted are the core; the rest of the roster is treated as an average team, so six stars do not become four lines of stars. Second, the cards are era-adjusted: a 50-goal season in the run-and-gun 1980s and one in the dead-puck years are not the same thing, and the model knows it. Third, one weak slot, or an ordinary goalie, drags on everything the other five built.

Read the +X W column on the breakdown and find the weakest link. That is where the wins went.

Conceptually, yes: the How it works page walks through what the model does and why. The exact weights are not published. A-Squad is a draft, not a calculator; publishing them would turn every spin into a lookup and end the argument, and the argument is the fun part. We also tune the model between seasons, so any number we printed would be stale by the next one.

The NHL plays an 84-game schedule starting in 2026-27, so that is the season every squad is projected onto, written as wins, losses and overtime losses. Every era sits on the same 84-game scale, which is what lets a 1950s squad and a 2020s squad be compared at all. A perfect season is 84-0-0, and it is possible but rare.

They are two different yardsticks, labelled differently on purpose. Beats X% of squads, on the jumbotron after a run, compares your record with a large population of simulated competent squads, so it means the same thing on your first day as it does a year from now. The Field, on your GM Card, compares your recent average with real players, and it appears once you have three Play runs on your card.

Your wins divided by the best record our solver found for those exact spins. It separates how well you drafted from how well the spins treated you, which matters most on a challenge, where everyone shares the same seed. The solver is a heuristic, not an oracle, so it can be beaten: if you outdraft it, the best-found figure moves up to yours and Draft % reads 100%. It is not shown on boosted runs, because paid re-rolls change the problem.

Coins are earned only. Every completed run pays 5, up to 50 a day from runs. The ranked daily pays 15 more. Streak milestones pay 50 at seven days and 250 at thirty. The top grades pay a bonus: 15 for DYNASTY, 50 for HISTORIC and 250 for PERFECT. There is nothing to buy, coins have no cash value, and they cannot be traded or transferred.

Guests hold up to 100 coins. Sign in and the balance moves to your account and the cap comes off.

Every run comes with one free team re-spin and one free era re-spin. In Play and Practice you can spend coins on extras, priced 25, 50, 100 and 200 within a run, four at most. A run that spends a coin is marked boosted: it earns no coins, stays off your GM Card and off every board, and shows no Draft %. Daily and challenge runs never allow purchases; everyone plays those with the same fixed budget.

Yes. We do not detect ad blockers and nothing in the game is gated behind turning one off. Ads are what keep A-Squad free, so if you find the game worth your time we would appreciate you letting them load, but that is your call and the game plays exactly the same either way.

Signed in, open the Account screen. It has an Export button that downloads everything we hold about you as a JSON file, and a Delete button that removes your account and scrubs your personal data. As a guest, clearing your browser’s site data or the app’s storage deletes your ID and history. In both cases, rows already posted to a public board survive with no name attached.

You must be 13 or older to create an account. Sign-up asks for a birth year and we keep only an age band, 13 to 17 or 18 and over, never the date itself. Players we know to be 13 to 17 never see personalised ads, and there is no setting that changes that. Guest play does not ask an age, and anyone under 13 gets a polite dead end at sign-up.

Not yet. The web app works on any phone today; add it to your home screen and it opens like an app. Native apps for iOS and Android are coming from the same codebase, and we will say so here when they are ready. We are not naming a date until we have one we can keep.

No. Not affiliated with the NHL, its clubs, the NHLPA or the NHL Alumni Association. Player names and statistics are facts of the public record. We use no league or club logos and no player photographs, and we take the numbers from the publicly available record the same way a newspaper does.