Why teammates step six metres instead of teleporting

If dragging one player scrambles all fourteen figures across the field, nobody learns cause and effect. Bounded six-metre steps keep team shape honest.

A classic magnetic tactics board has the opposite problem from a video game: nothing moves unless you push every magnet one by one. Drag your central midfielder wide, and everyone else sits frozen in a broken shape while your kid waits for you to rearrange nine other discs.

Our first automatic-positioning prototype solved that too aggressively. Move one fullback inside, and the entire team snapped twenty metres into a textbook diagram. It looked clever to an adult coach and completely baffling to a ten-year-old.

The fix was a hard movement budget of six metres per release, paired with explicit pin and freeze rings. Move the ball carrier toward the right channel, and the nearest midfielder angles into a clean support lane while the opposing block shifts a few paces across. Nobody teleports behind your back.

Even better, the whole release counts as one undo step and one recorded demonstration frame. You can step back and forth between two shapes until your player sees how one three-metre run opens the next pass.