Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

Product Information

Based on that information, you decide which players you’ll have suit up and where to position them. You’ll also play one of your tactics cards to decide your team’s formation. You may have more than one of these, and some have additional powers you can execute after the opponent’s team is fully revealed. You’ll then flip the opponent card, revealing how they’ve allocated their players and what those players’ offensive powers are, and based on that, figure out the score of the match. Once that’s determined, you’ll either go up on the league table (that’s the British term for the league standings) with a win or draw, or you’ll stay where you are with a loss. In addition, you may suffer some additional consequences, such as injuries or suspensions for your players. You then reset and get ready for next week.

Eleven: Football Manager Board Game is an economic strategy game set in a world of sport. Your task is to manage and grow your own football club over the course of a season. During the game, you hire staff members, including trainers, physical therapists, PR specialists, and directors. You acquire sponsors, expand the stadium infrastructure, and take care of your club’s position in social media. Among the many tasks on the list are transferring new players and choosing the right tactics for each of the upcoming matches. Now, once you have the hang of it, matches are actually a fun puzzle. 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. (Sometimes, the scouting reports seemed to be OK, but not exactly accurate. This “fog of war” may lead to a win versus a draw in some cases, too.) Fair, but there’s no getting around it. The match portion of Eleven is the “worst” part of the game, because it is overcomplicated to the point of comedy. During my first teach of Eleven, I breezed through everything except the matches, then just told the other players that we’ll just do a demo of the way matches play out during the first round of the game because it is so hard to describe it to another player. Monday is unique to the rest of the week, as it primarily focuses on front-office activities. Resources are replenished based on each club’s income, and then each manager draws an event card for their respective clubs that will prompt a board of directors vote. This involves a die roll, and depending on the makeup of your board and how they are inclined to vote, it may lead to good results or a big inconvenience that your club has to contend with for this week.A few critiques are worth mentioning. Tactics cards are crucial to winning matches. Each player starts with only one and there are not enough ways to acquire more. Some staff cards offer the ability to get more tactics cards, but if those cards don’t come out, it can be quite difficult to play an appropriate formation against another team, and you may not have the advantage of being able to play a second tactics card for its unique power. The full player layout, a nice presence, but quite the table hog Eleven: Football Manager Board Game is an economic strategy game set in a world of sport. Your task is to manage and grow your own football club over the course of a season. During the game, you hire staff members, including trainers, physical therapists, PR specialists, and directors. You acquire sponsors, expand the stadium infrastructure, and take care of your club's position in social media. Among the many tasks on the list are transferring new players and choosing the right tactics for each of the upcoming matches.

Eleven surprised me. 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). Eleven has shown me that it is possible to make a good game based around a sport, as long as it doesn’t try to directly mimic the sport itself, which Eleven doesn’t. The matches, for example, only make up a small part of the game. 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. But every team knows that to be the best in the league it takes a lot more than players; it also takes an incredible manager. Eleven is a game about soccer (or football, if you’re living anywhere outside of the US). It’s about the economics of managing a soccer club, putting the right players on the field, board room decisions and even getting sponsors for your team. 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. This means that you’ll mostly have basic players playing in your match (especially in the first few rounds), with a couple of upgraded position players available too. All the upgraded cards have to be placed in the section of the field that is their specialty (forward, midfielder, defense). Further, each upgraded player is either an offensive or defensive player. Yes, this may mean that your best offensive players are playing on the defensive side of the pitch, which may feel like they are standing in the wrong part of the field!Much like the video games I mentioned earlier, Eleven is not a robust soccer simulation. In fact, games of Eleven really come down to this: you play a tactics card to detail your formation–4-3-3, 3-5-2, all the standards you are probably used to if you are a soccer nut. I’ve done four plays (two solo, one three-player game and one four-player game) and, generally, games play out the same way no matter how many people sit at the table. In part, that is because it will be rare that someone snipes the best cards from the market—there’s plenty of everything to go around. And you need a mix of players for your team just like everyone else. For the Mondays and Matchday portions, the game is basically multiplayer solitaire.

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. Which is another point worth mentioning: You do not need to know anything about football to enjoy this game. This was surprising to me, because the theme comes through so strongly. When we played the terms or concepts that are now ingrained within me, such as tables and scoring, tactical orientations, and buying and selling players, did not trip up my non-football-watching friends. Who knows, maybe getting your non-football-watching gamer friends to play this could even spark an interest in the sport. Finally, there’s match day. This is where your club is pitted against an NPC (non-player club) for the week’s match. Your opponent is represented by a card only giving you partial information on the side you can view throughout the week. The card will show you your opponent’s formation (These are a series of numbers that explain how the defenders, midfielders, and forwards are accounted for. ex. 4-3-3; 4-3-2-1, etc.), as well as offer up a scouting report giving you additional limited information (e.g., this team has a formidable left wing forward; this team is weak on the right side, etc.). At the end of each week, your team goes up against an opponent. At the end of the season, the team in first place in your league will earn a bunch of points, sometimes as much as half of their overall score. So, the soccer part is pretty important. At the end of January, Portal Games announced their publishing plan for 2021. The football fanatic in me was drawn to one game in particular: Eleven: Football Manager Board Game.If you can survive that, though, I think Eleven does a great job of giving players a taste of what it might be like to manage the business of a top-flight soccer organization. Months ago, I read up on a board game version of these video games that was coming to tabletop. In time for the World Cup, Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022, Portal Games) has arrived. Eleven is the most thematic game to hit my table in months, and has some of the things I loved most about The Networks (2016, Formal Ferret Games) without the tongue-in-cheek approach.