Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

Product Information

How valuable Eleven is going to be for you will depend on how much you allow yourself to be immersed in its theme. Generally, if you win, better things happen than if you lose, and higher numbers are always better than lower numbers.

A minor note about the rulebook – Portal Games has a somewhat notorious name when it comes to rulebooks. The barriers for entry are high for a medium-weight game, which will absolutely turn some people off. Right at the start of each round (Monday, in the game’s parlance), you draw a board meeting card and then roll a die. Who knows, maybe getting your non-football-watching gamer friends to play this could even spark an interest in the sport.Sponsor cards have three uses: they can be discarded for cash; they can be used to take either a one-time cash/income bonus or a special power; or they can become your jersey sponsor, allowing you to take both a cash/income bonus and a special power. All matches are against game-controlled opponents and even the league standings feel less firm and more abstract due to the awkward co-existence of isolated teams in a shared league. You have a full set of jersey numbers to assign to your players, but each player comes with their own chosen number too (the divas), so there’s often no point in hiring two number 10s for example, as only one can play.

The solo mode includes six different scenarios that challenge players with different starting situations and goals for the season. Finally, below the board is an area to keep your staff member cards; all players start with a starting trainer card. With just a little bit of advanced stat computation it’s easy to see that always seeking out offensive recruits will result in greater success on match day.Back when I was a boy (even when I was a teen), I was always confused when my favourite football team (Ajax) would sell players, but seldom spend all of the earnings; in fact, rarely did they spend even just half of the total transfer fees. 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 difficulty feels like the right fit and I’m excited to play this solo while the World Cup games are playing in the background! The clever bit of these event cards is that they encapsulate the extended design philosophy of the whole, presenting Thomas Jansen’s ideals up front with complete clarity. You toss dice to simulate their sloshy whims, the outcome of a single roll translating to votes based on a director’s individual approach.