The notebook
Part of the complete Subbuteo guide
Most pages about subbuteo rules hand you a list. Fifteen minutes a half, three touches, something about a shooting line — and then leave you to work out why any of it matters. This one does the opposite. Every rule below comes from the official FISTF rulebook, and every rule comes with the reason it exists.
Because there is a reason, and it is a single one. Once you see it, the whole rulebook stops looking like bureaucracy and starts looking like design.
Here it is: your opponent can never interfere with your move. In football, the defender tackles you. In subbuteo, the defender waits. You flick, and only after your flick does your opponent get to move one figure. Everything else in the rulebook exists to keep that promise honest.
That is why subbuteo is not a game of speed or force. It is a game where the only person who can ruin your attack is you. Miss the contact, and the turn is over. Nobody took it from you.
The most important rule is the smallest. You propel a figure by placing your index or middle finger next to it and striking with the fingernail against the base. Not the top. Not the little man. The base.
The official laws are strict about what is not allowed: you cannot touch the upper part of the figure, you cannot push it, you cannot drag it, and you cannot rest your hand on the playing surface for leverage. Your hand and forearm must not move during the flick — only the finger. This is what separates a flick from a shove, and it is the first thing a referee looks at.
You keep playing for as long as your figure touches the ball. Your turn does not end on a timer or a move count — it ends the moment you miss. But there is a cap: a maximum of three consecutive touches with the same figure. After that, another figure must play the ball, or possession changes.
Three is not arbitrary. One touch would make the game a series of disconnected pokes. Unlimited touches would let a single star figure dribble the length of the table, and the other ten men would be decoration. Three is the smallest number that forces you to pass — it makes a team out of eleven pieces of plastic.
This is the rule newcomers discover the hard way, usually by scoring a screamer that gets chalked off. Each half of the pitch is divided into two equal zones by the shooting line. You may only score if the shot was struck from completely inside the shooting area. Referees literally call out "shootable!" when the ball has fully crossed the line.
Remove that line and the optimal strategy becomes obvious and boring: park a figure near the halfway line and blast away all afternoon. The shooting line forces you to come forward, into the crowded part of the table, within reach of the defence. It does not take away possibilities — it manufactures risk, and risk is the entire point.
Yes, subbuteo has an offside law, and it mirrors football more closely than most people expect. An attacking figure is offside if it is inside the opponent shooting area, nearer the goal than the ball, and nearer than the last defender — or nearer than the second-to-last, in the case where the keeper has been removed and the reserve keeper is in use.
The clever part is when it is called. Offside is only declared once the ball passes the base of the last defender and ends up completely inside the shooting area — or when the ball actually touches the offside figure. In other words: you are not punished for standing in a bad spot, only for benefiting from it.
The keeper is not flicked. He sits under a bar at the back of the goal, with a rod running out behind, and you steer him with one hand from outside the pitch. The rule that keeps it fair: the keeper may not move sharply before the attacking figure has touched the ball. No pre-emptive diving. He reacts, like everyone else.
Each player fields a maximum of 10 outfield figures, 1 goalkeeper and 1 reserve goalkeeper — the reserve is a real, regulated piece of equipment, not a spare in the box.
The laws codify a handful of specific offences, and the names are wonderfully literal:
Punishments run from a free-flick to a penalty-flick or a "back" (the ball is returned). Cards exist too: yellow is a warning, orange costs you the use of your reserve goalkeeper, and red is immediate disqualification with a minimum 0-3 defeat.
If you have ever wondered whether your set is regulation, here are the real numbers:
Note how wide those tolerances are. The laws are permissive about the furniture and merciless about the gesture — which tells you exactly where this sport thinks the skill lives.
Peter Adolph (1916-1994), an RAF veteran and keen birdwatcher, filed his patent in August 1946 and put the game on sale in March 1947 from Tunbridge Wells, in Kent. He wanted to call it "Hobby" and could not register the trademark, so he reached instead for the scientific name of the hobby falcon — *Falco subbuteo*. The first sets had cardboard figures you cut out yourself, wire goals with paper nets, and no cloth at all: you chalked the pitch onto a blanket.
The modern rulebook is not his, though. It belongs to the FISTF, founded on 16 June 1992 in Hamburg from the merger of two earlier bodies, the ETF and FISA. That is the body whose laws are described above, and it is why the sport survived the toy brand that started it.
Two details are worth correcting, because even enthusiast sites repeat them wrongly:
At the 2024 World Cup in Tunbridge Wells — the sport returning to the town where it was born — the Open title went to Dimitrios Dimopoulos of Greece, Veterans to Mario Camilleri of Malta, Women to Eleonora Buttitta of Italy, U20 to Matteo Esposito of Italy, U16 to Francesco Manfredelli of Italy and U12 to Max Pereira of Portugal. In the team events, Italy took four of the six titles.
One honest note to finish. Almost nobody plays the full FISTF laws on a kitchen table, and nobody should feel bad about it. Most households play a simplified version: flick, keep going while you connect, shoot from wherever feels fair. That is a legitimate way to enjoy the game — the official laws exist to make competition fair between strangers, not to police your living room.
But it is worth knowing the real rules for one reason: they are a masterclass in game design. Three touches to force passing. A shooting line to force risk. An alternating turn to protect the attacker. Sixty years before anyone said "game balance", a birdwatcher from Kent had already worked it out.
Those same three ideas are the ones we built Toy Soccer Cup around — the touch, the turn that ends when you miss, and a shot that has to be earned. Different table, same laws underneath.
Every law, measurement and result above was checked against these — the rulebook first, in its own words:
One correction worth flagging, because this page had it wrong until August 2026: the offside law is measured against the last defender when the goalkeeper is in use, not the second-to-last. Rule 13.1.1.1 c1 and c2. If you spot another error, tell me and it gets fixed and noted.
