As the NFL season kicks off, Honor Mountain Interactive is back with another sports enthusiast app: Fantasy Football Survivor.
This third iPhone app from Honor Mountain is a free-to-play game that awards cash prizes to winners. It is designed for casual users and it only takes 10 seconds weekly to play. It’s another fantasy sports prize game, which can be played legally in 42 states, and roughly 57 million people played fantasy football in the last NFL season.
Michael Ehrenberg, founder of Honor Mountain, said that Fantasy Football Survivor the first freemium fantasy sports game played for cash prizes. Players can activate in-game items using tokens, like Sneak Peeks which allow one player to view another player’s pick prior to games starting. You can block players from seeing your picks by activating a Shield.
The title is the first of many games that will be launched within the app. Next month, the app will feature Fantasy Basketball Survivor, tied to NBA games. The market potential is big, as more than 200 million fans watched NFL games last season. Ehrenberg believes that this new app is the right way to target fans who don’t have a lot of time to play.
The winner takes home a cash prize. Rather than burning hours selecting 11 of 1700 NFL players to build a team, in Fantasy Football Survivor you pick 1 of 32 Quarterback Squads, comprised of the starting and backup quarterbacks from one NFL team versus another. If your selected quarterback squad scores more fantasy points than its opposing squad, then you survive to the next week. One loss or tie knocks you out. The last surviving player wins the cash prize.
The game is simple, but the strategy is not, Ehrenberg said.
The challenge is determining when to select a squad, because each squad can be selected only once during the season. The more rounds you survive the fewer squads you have remaining. Selecting high-performing squads early leaves you with bad squads in late rounds. Get risky selecting weak squads early puts you in a strong position in later rounds. A new Survivor game starts every week of the NFL season.
To help you select your squad each week activate in-game items using tokens, which are earned for free through achievements — the more you play, the more you earn. The bird’s eye binoculars enable you to see the percentage of total players who selected each squad to gauge whether to go with or against popular picks.
The company’s previous games were Bracket the Madness and Super Salvo Sports. Bracked the Madness players played more than 300,000 sessions in 30 days. Honor Mountain has raised $400,000 from seed investors and it has five employees.
Ehrenberg founded Honor Mountain Interactive in September, 2014, with offices in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio. He started the company with his father, Mitchell Ehrenberg, who earned the nickname “the Oracle of Akron” among family and friends for his uncanny ability to predict college basketball outcomes.