In this game, you take control of a soccer club over a six week season; each week being played over the course of one of the six rounds in the game. Now, do the same for the opponents attackers; see if you block them with a defensive player in the same area, and if not, with your goalkeeper. Who knows, maybe getting your non-football-watching gamer friends to play this could even spark an interest in the sport. Despite the complete lack of miniatures, it occupies a physical space roughly equivalent to the most sprawling of crowdfunding plastic designs.

Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (to be referred to henceforth simply as Eleven) is a 1-4 player, economic action selection, open drafting game with a fair spot of luck involved The game will run you between 1-4 hours, heavily dependant on player count. The idea of a sport in board game form has never really appealed to me, especially something as prone to chaos, and not stat-driven as football (or soccer, if you’re across the Atlantic). Sell a player (or youngster) – discard a card you already own, gaining 2 money plus one money per current strength level as well as money for any VP tokens placed on the card. The game is played over six rounds, each round representing a week in the league and itself broken up into 5 days (Monday through Thursday and then “the weekend”/match day). You’re not spending money to boost player strength, you’re acquiring a new training facility and enacting a fresh strength regimen.Finally, operation is the resource that’s tied to building stadium infrastructure or offices or being able to execute extra actions.

I would likely not, but one of my friends who played in the three-player game said he would, and he knows nothing about football. Your fitness is what you need to make sure your players are fit to play, but you can also train them. Each week runs pretty smoothly, and by the 2nd or 3rd week of your first game, you should have that sequence down pat. Right at the start of each round (Monday, in the game’s parlance), you draw a board meeting card and then roll a die. But not only the players are important in the club, don’t forget the 16 Director cards, 36 Staff cards , 36 Sponsor cards and 36 Board Meeting cards .The biggest criticism I have for Eleven is that out-of-the-box, you can’t do the one thing you might expect in a football game. I made the active decision that this would be the year that I got into the English Premier League, that I started paying attention in a more serious way to the world’s most popular sport. So, if you have an overwhelming majority of attacking players, if you put them in the right places, they can score goals. What I did like was how you resolve the other league matches, rolling a die based on their emblem colour, each die having different probabilities. Mark Jackson (3 plays with Dale’s copy): I acknowledge all of Dale’s concerns… and echo his praise as well.

I’m not even really a solo gamer, I would almost never choose to play a board game by myself instead of reading a book, catching up on my favorite TV show, or playing a video game. There are a lot of fiddly bits to the process here, but this is the closest I have ever seen to a game about the business of sports that actually works. The phases of Monday and Friday are resolved simultaneously, but Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you will play in turns with other players. The Club Board is a place for your Staff cards and 4 Statistics tracks – Cash, Fan Base, Operation and Fitness. There’s plenty of depth and nuance as to how you apply the various effects, but the iconography throughout is excellent, so accomplishing what you want to is down to whether your tactics work, not because you didn’t understand what a certain card or effect did.

Positioning your players in just the right spots so that you can score goals while defending against anything written in the scouting report is the key to victory.

Eleven — the number of players you have on the pitch at any given time, with those players making all the difference between being the best team and the worst. The game was similar to the Franchise mode in the Madden franchise of video games, where players could focus more on how a team plays each game than the playing of the sport itself. The game is very much an economic game by mechanism; and knowledge of actual football tactics and strategy will likely not help you win more matches in the game. I enjoyed deciding if I wanted to bring a diaper company on as my sponsor, and whether I should put their logo on my jerseys for a bigger payout or just give them a billboard instead. We are entering very meaty Euro territory, from a time-commitment perspective, maybe even Trickerion territory.The way that injuries and card suspensions work fits perfectly, and the game is a fantastic choice for someone who craves that Football Manager experience on a table, instead of a screen. In writing, the rulebook dedicates five of its 30 pages to tell players how to successfully score matches. One of my favorite things about Eleven is hiring youngsters—all the youngster cards are faceless and nameless until they are trained (the flip side of each youngster card). This is also one of the strongest bids in Portal’s catalog of fulfilling their promise of “Board Games That Tell Stories.