Hockey Legacy Manager 27 puts you in charge of a hockey team's front office. You draft, trade, negotiate contracts, hire your coaching staff, set your lines and then live with the results, season after season, for as long as you want to keep going.

What sets it apart from other games in the genre is how fast it moves. A full season, playoffs included, simulates in well under a minute on an ordinary computer. That changes what a career can be. You can run a club for thirty or fifty years across a few evenings and still see every trade, every draft class and every player who came up through your system.

You can begin in 1917 and manage a franchise through the whole history of the sport, or start in the present day and go forward from there. There is no end date and nothing is scripted. Teams rise and fall, records get broken, and the prospect you built your rebuild around sometimes turns out to be ordinary.

If you would rather build your own hockey world, the editors are open. Change teams, players, coaches and leagues, run an expansion draft, or put together a league structure that has never existed.

New in HLM27

If you played HLM26, this is what has changed.

Trade trees. Follow any trade forward to see where a player came from, what he was moved for later, and how the deal looks years on.

College hockey. Six conferences ship in the default roster, and you can build your own. Recruiting runs against every other program in the country, where a prestige rating that moves with your results decides which players will listen, and commitments run freshman through senior until a player leaves early or loses his eligibility.

Eleven new starting years. 1930, 1950, 1965, 1975, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2003, 2014, 2016 and 2025, each with the salary cap and contract rules of its era. Minor leagues are playable in history mode now too.

Minor league control. Trades, contracts, free agency and roster assignment for your minor league club, and you can disable a minor league without disabling the one below it. You can also start a career managing in the minors.

Post-season tournaments. Junior and college champions meet in a round robin that leads into a semifinal and a final, each with its own page for the bracket, standings, scoring leaders and past winners.

Also on iOS and Android

HLM runs on phones as well as on PC, which as far as I know makes it the only hockey management game you can play on both. The mobile version is free to download, so if you are not sure the genre is for you, that is a cheap way to find out before buying anything.

Nine years, one developer

I have been building Hockey Legacy Manager on my own since 2019, and HLM27 is the ninth edition. HLM26 sits at 92% positive on Steam. Most of what is in this year's version, college hockey and the extra history starts especially, came out of what players asked for on Reddit and in the forums over the past year.