About Dream Draft XI
Dream Draft XI is a free football drafting game for the browser. You pick eleven players and a coach one card at a time, choose a formation, and watch a 2D simulation decide the match. It is designed for football-mad kids roughly eight to fourteen years old, and it works just as well on a phone at half time as on a laptop.
Who makes it
The game started as a father-and-son project — Leo came up with the idea of drafting a dream team like you would swap stickers, and his dad built it. It is still made by the two of us, and every card, fun fact and stadium in the game was added by hand rather than scraped in bulk.
What is actually in the game
- A hand-written database of 160-plus current players and legends, each with a short, verified trivia fact and a source link.
- Real-world coaches as a twelfth pick, weighted heavily in the final score.
- Five formations, three AI difficulty levels, tournaments, and online rooms you can share by link.
- A collection, a career mode, weekly objectives, a public gallery and a weekly leaderboard.
- An in-game store with coin packs and cosmetic bundles, plus a small "Support the game" tip for anyone who wants to help out.
- Six languages: English, Dutch, Finnish, French, Spanish and German.
Keeping it safe for kids
Anything a player can type — team names, manager names, guild names — passes through a multilingual filter that blocks hateful and offensive language, enforced both in the browser and again on the server so it cannot be bypassed. Rejected names are logged in anonymised form so we can fix false positives. There are no chat messages between players and no adverts aimed at children. You can read exactly what we store in our privacy policy.
How it is built
Dream Draft XI is a React application with a hosted backend for accounts, online rooms, replays and leaderboards. Match sounds are synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API rather than downloaded, which keeps the game small and fast on mobile data. Accounts use social sign-in only — we never handle a password.
Is it free?
Yes. Every mode is free to play, and Match Coins are earned by playing matches, completing objectives and winning tournaments. If you want to speed things up, you can buy coin packs or cosmetic bundles in the store. There is also a small "Support the game" tip for anyone who wants to help keep the game running. Coins only unlock cosmetic stadiums, kits and perks — they never give you a better team.
How we pay for it
Hosting is paid for by a small number of adverts on our written guides and on this page. You will never see an advert during a draft, a match, or on a loading or results screen — ads only appear alongside articles, they are always labelled, and they are kept well away from anything you tap while playing. We do not run interstitials, pop-ups or auto-playing video, and no advertising is targeted at children.
Contact
Found a wrong fact about a player, a name wrongly blocked, or a bug? Email luggage.2tilde@icloud.com and we will fix it. We read everything.
New here? Start with the how to play guide.