The full rules.
Everything that goes into a Voltball season — roster, formation, Tempo, coaches, and what actually decides who wins.
The basics
Voltball is a fantasy league built directly on your Zappies Reborn collection. Every held Zappy is a real player. Each week you build an 8-player roster, choose a formation and a Tempo, and your team plays out live — quarter by quarter, broadcast at a real pace, not resolved instantly behind the scenes.
Registration happens once, at the start of a season. Lineups get set — and can be changed — every week, up until that week's matches actually air.
Building your roster
You need 8 roster-eligible Zappies held in your connected wallet. Each week, you slot all 8 into four positions:
- QB — the anchor of the lineup
- Striker — leans primarily on VLT, with SPK as a secondary factor
- Mid — leans primarily on SPK, with INS as a secondary factor
- Guard — leans primarily on INS, with VLT as a secondary factor
Position matters as much as which Zappy you pick — the same Zappy can be a standout at one position and unremarkable at another, since each position weighs a different pair of stats.
Season-allocated stats
Here's something that surprises people: the VLT/INS/SPK values your Zappies play with this season aren't fixed forever. Once per season, at the moment the season is created, every Zappy in the entire collection gets a fresh, randomly-allocated performance band — Legendary, All-Pro, Starter, Backup, or Practice Squad — and its stats for that season are borrowed from a real peer currently in that band.
Rarer trait combinations get better odds, not a guarantee:
| Rarity tier | Legendary | All-Pro | Starter | Backup | Practice Squad |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 (rarest ~10%) | 5% | 35% | 60% | — | — |
| Tier 2 (mid ~30%) | — | 15% | 40% | 35% | 10% |
| Tier 3 (common ~60%) | — | 5% | 25% | 45% | 25% |
Formation & Tempo
Your formation sets how many roster spots each position gets — this shifts where your team's strength has to concentrate:
| Formation | QB | Striker | Mid | Guard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OFFENSE | 1 | 5 | 1 | 1 |
| BALANCED | 1 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| DEFENSE | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
Your Tempo is a separate dial, 1 to 10, that controls risk — not who plays, but how your team plays:
Controlled plays it safer — smaller swings, a better average outcome. Aggressive swings bigger both ways — higher ceiling, higher risk. 5.5 is the default, right in the Standard range. Formation and Tempo work together, not independently: an Aggressive Tempo on a Defense-heavy formation plays very differently than the same Tempo on Offense.
Coach Heroes
Hold a Hero NFT and it coaches your team with a real signature play that can swing a quarter directly. No Hero — you register as "No Coach" and compete entirely on roster and strategy. It's a genuine edge, not a requirement to play.
Every signature play is calibrated to land around the same ~7–9 point total match-average edge — none of them scale with formation or how many Zappies you put in any slot. Three intentionally different shapes of getting there:
| Hero | Mechanic | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Bison | Flat, every quarter | +2.0 guaranteed, all 4 quarters (= 8.0 total) — zero randomness, identical every game |
| Bat | 50% chance, Q1 only | -16.0 to the opponent if it fires — expected value 8.0, but real variance: roughly half your games get 0, half get 16 |
| Alien | Guaranteed once, timing varies | -8.0 to the opponent — fires 30% of the time in Q1, otherwise guaranteed in Q2. Not a coin flip on whether it happens, only when |
Same target average — completely different risk profile. Every Hero below follows the same ~8-point calibration; tap one to see exactly how it gets there.
The pack gets hungrier as the match wears on. Grows every quarter the match continues — +0.8 × the quarter number, so Q1 is +0.8, Q4 is +3.2. Totals 8.0 across a full match if it goes the distance.
Sits back early, cashes in late. A small guaranteed Q1 penalty (-3.0) followed by a bigger guaranteed Q4 payoff (+11.0) — net +8.0, but the shape of the match feels different from a flat bonus: behind early, ahead late.
Bulldozes straight through the opposing defense. 25% chance per quarter to completely negate the opponent's defense reduction against this team for that quarter — not a bonus, a full cancel of their defensive edge when it lands.
Locks the opponent out of their big play. 35% chance per quarter to deny one of the opponent's random events entirely and capitalize with a +4.0 bonus of its own — a two-for-one when it fires.
Refuses to let the worst quarter sink them. Guaranteed once per match — not chance-based — floors whichever quarter would otherwise be this team's single lowest, boosting it by +10.0. Always fires exactly once.
A lucky bounce goes their way. Standard flat-bonus play — 25% chance per quarter for a flat +8.0.
Strikes early and hard before the opponent settles in. Big chance, but Q1 only — 50% for +16.0, meaning expected value 8.0 with real swing: half the time nothing, half the time a big early lead.
Wears the opponent down possession by possession. Same escalating shape as Wolf's Pack Hunt, mirrored onto the opponent as a growing reduction instead of a growing bonus — same 8.0 total magnitude.
The bite doesn't hurt right away — the poison does. A flat drain on the opponent starting Q2, not Q1 — roughly 2.67 per quarter for the remaining 3 quarters (≈8.0 total), true to the poison theme of not hitting immediately.
Smells blood in the water when the opponent is trailing. Unlike every other Hero here, this one isn't fixed-magnitude — it scales directly with how far behind the opponent's running total is, capped at +20.0. The further behind they fall, the harder Shark presses; a close game gets little to nothing from this play.
Even the bot doesn't know which stat is about to triple. Mechanically identical to Rabbit's Lucky Foot — 25% chance per quarter, flat +8.0 — dressed up with "random stat" flavor text, not an actual formation-dependent bonus (an earlier version scaled to formation and was reworked to stay flat and fair across all three).
Beams away the opponent's power when they least expect it. Always fires exactly once, either Quarter 1 (30% of the time) or Quarter 2 (the other 70%) — not a coin flip on whether it happens, only when. -8.0 to the opponent, guaranteed.
A precision strike before the opponent even sees it coming. 50% chance in Q1 only for -16.0 to the opponent — same shape as Eagle's Talon Strike, just aimed at the other side of the field instead of boosting its own team.
Runs the opponent over, every single quarter. A flat, guaranteed +2.0 every quarter, no chance involved at all — 8.0 total, identical every game. The only Hero with zero randomness in its own play.
How a match plays out
Voltball isn't scored like traditional football — there's no downs or possessions changing hands. It's one continuous Voltage formula, resolved quarter by quarter, driven by your roster's real stats, your formation and Tempo choices, and your coach's signature play if you have one.
Matches broadcast at a real pace once they kick off — a kickoff post goes out with a link to watch live, and the full recap (final score, quarter-by-quarter breakdown, and your coach's flavor text if their play fired) posts once playback would actually be finished. Every quarter gets real commentary, even a quiet one — nothing's ever a fake number dressed up as an event.
What actually decides the outcome
No single choice guarantees a win. Here's the real formula, not a description of its shape.
Position weighting — the actual split
Striker, Mid, and Guard each weigh two stats, not one — 70% from a primary stat, 30% from a secondary:
| Position | Primary (70%) | Secondary (30%) |
|---|---|---|
| Striker | VLT | SPK |
| Mid | SPK | INS |
| Guard | INS | VLT |
These weights are mean-normalized against the full 1,678-Zappy collection, so no position starts with an inherent edge — the 70/30 split is deliberate, not accidental.
QB — not a pooled weight, a multiplier
QB works differently from the other three positions entirely. It doesn't pool with anyone — your QB's own SPK stat drives a multiplier on your team's whole base offense for that quarter:
54.61 is the real collection-wide average SPK, so a perfectly average QB is exactly neutral (1.0×, no effect at all). A strong QB (SPK in the 90s, near the real top of the collection) lifts the whole team's offense by roughly 2%; a weak one drags it down by up to 5% at the floor. Real, but deliberately modest — an earlier, more aggressive version of this let QB alone produce a 100% win rate in extreme cases, which defeated the point of it being one input among several. This version caps a common QB gap at roughly a 56% edge, not a lock.
The full quarter formula
Here's the actual calculation, in order, for one team in one quarter:
mid_component = Mid_pool(SPK) × 0.077 + Mid_pool(INS) × 0.0368
base_offense = striker_component + mid_component
defense_reduction = min(opponent Guard_pool(INS) × 0.0005, 0.25) // capped at 25% — defense can never fully shut you out
turnover_bonus = own Guard_pool(INS) × 0.070 + own Guard_pool(VLT) × 0.0421
quarter_voltage = (base_offense × (1 − defense_reduction) + turnover_bonus)
× Average Multiplier // Tempo's average-shift, see below
× qb_multiplier
A team's own Guard pool does double duty — it reduces how much the opponent's defense can cut into your offense (indirectly, via the opponent's own defense_reduction math) and directly adds turnover_bonus on top. That's the whole deterministic core; random quarter events (Lightning, Cold Streak, Trick Play, and the rest) and coach signatures layer on separately, after this.
Tempo — actually two separate dials, not one
This is a genuine correction to how it's often described. Tempo doesn't touch the deterministic formula above at all — it only scales the random event layer, and it does that through two independent numbers that move in opposite directions:
| Controlled (1.0) | Aggressive (10.0) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average Multiplier | 1.06× | 0.94× |
| Volatility Multiplier (event size & odds) | 0.5× | 1.6× |
The Average Multiplier is the real average tradeoff — it multiplies the whole quarter's score directly, so Controlled is genuinely worth about 6% more on average, Aggressive about 6% less. The Volatility Multiplier is the bigger effect by far — it scales how often random events fire and how big they are when they do, more than tripling in strength from one end of the dial to the other. In practice: Tempo is primarily a variance dial, with a real but comparatively modest average-outcome tradeoff layered underneath it. Cranking to full Aggressive doesn't mainly change your expected score — it mainly changes how wildly a single match can swing away from it.
Standings & playoffs
Every result updates the standings — win/loss record, tracked all season. At the end of the regular season, the top 4 teams make the playoffs: 1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3 in the semifinal, both winners meet in the championship the following week. Win it, and you're the season's champion.
The weekly rhythm
- Lineups can be set, and changed, any time before that week's matches actually air — locking in isn't final until kickoff
- Matches for the week go live in a staggered broadcast through the day, not all at once
- Scores and standings stay hidden for a match until it's actually finished airing — even your own result, checked on your own team page, respects this. No spoilers, ever.