Rikogol

Rikogol is a top-down arcade football game played on a walled pitch, supporting team sizes from 1v1 up to 11v11. There are no fouls, no offside rule, no stamina bars and no hidden player statistics. The developer has written the physics from scratch rather than relying on a game engine’s built-in system, and each match is run by a single host so that all participants see the same simulation. Online play uses Steam lobbies and Steam Relay: players can invite friends directly or use a match browser to join public rooms, filtered by stadium and team size, with no port forwarding or additional accounts required. For solo play there is a training pitch with no bots and no timer.

The game’s distinguishing feature is the Head Coach role. One player per team may leave the pitch to coach instead, without controlling a player or interacting with the ball. The coach can set the team formation at kickoff, at half time and after each goal, choosing from presets such as 4-4-2, 4-3-3 and 3-5-2 or dragging individual players into positions manually. They can also place pings on the pitch (pass, push up, drop back and attention), each with a distinct sound cue; draw an unlimited number of arrows directly onto the field; and call a vote to remove a disruptive player from play while keeping them in the room. Players are not locked to their assigned positions, and everything the coach draws is shown only to their own team, with the filtering handled on the host rather than the client.

Around the core match, Rikogol includes 65 Steam Achievements covering goals, results, stadiums, the coaching tools, multiplayer and time played, and Steam Cloud support for synchronising key bindings, volume, language and video settings across machines. Accessibility options include alternative team colour palettes for deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia, a high-contrast palette, adjustable text size, separate volume sliders for match sounds and coach signals, and stereo positional audio. All controls can be rebound, menus can be navigated by keyboard alone, and the game contains no quick-time events, screen shake or motion blur.