It’s not only Strictly that’s back – players wanting to take on the challenge of competing to select the highest-scoring dance team from Strictly 2024’s contestants each week can once again sign up for the “Fantasy Strictly Come Dancing” (FSCD) game. Teams need to be entered by the 7pm start of the show on Saturday 21st September.

FSCD is strictly unofficial, not endorsed in any way by the BBC, just run for people to play with friends, family and fellow Strictly fans. The idea originated ten years ago, taking the format from fantasy football, but adapting the rules to fit a TV game show.

“It all started as a bit of a laugh and we originally used Facebook to make it easy for a few friends to play together” explain the team at FSCD.  A decade later and that handful of friends has grown to a community of around 80 players pitting their wits each week to guess who will top the leaderboard.

Playing FSCD is easy as it uses Fantasizr.com – a website and app designed for running custom built fantasy games and leagues. The app makes picking your dancers and checking your scores really easy.

So how does it work? Well the instructions are clearly explained on Fantasizr but essentially you create a Dance Team (ideally with a silly name – dance puns welcome) and each week you ‘buy’ a set of dancers to be in your team. Each dancer has a points price and you have an overall points limit – so choose wisely.  Dancers then get points based on the scores they earn from the judges as well as a number of possible bonus points.

FCSD uses the Fantasizr app making it quick and easy to play

So who will do well this Series and who should we pick for our teams? Well a good starting point to help you decide is to look at the FSCD dancer values (priced in Strictly points!). FSCD generate these by looking at odds on betting websites, taking the average and converting them into dancer prices.

With its recent launch, we got our first glimpse of how FSCD has valued this year’s celebrities:

• Chris McCausland     14
• Dr Punam Krishan     7
• Jamie Borthwick     42
• JB Gill     21
• Montell Douglas     19
• Nick Knowles     4
• Paul Merson     4
• Pete Wicks     16
• Sam Quek     30
• Sarah Hadland     16
• Shayne Ward     38
• Tasha Ghouri     45
• Tom Dean     19
• Toyah Willcox     12
• Wynne Evans     8

You have points to ‘spend’ on four celebrities each week – who will you choose?

Hooked yet? Well if you fancy finding out more check out the Fantasy Strictly Come Dancing (FSCD) Facebook page and if you’d like to play you can sign up and join the FSCD league at Fantasizr. Don’t forget the sign-up deadline of 7pm at the start of the show on Saturday.

Thank you FSCD for running the game and we look forward to seeing some of you on the fantasy dancefloor!!! 😉