Superclub – Das Fußballmanager-Brettspiel

Product Information

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. Is it one of my favorite games from SPIEL 2022? Absolutely. I still look forward to playing the game, and I am seriously thinking about investing in some of the five small expansions that will add a new dimension to the game. It’s a game that I think about even after finishing a game – asking myself if I would have done better lining my shirts up in a different formation, or if I had chosen to risk it and re-roll an event die to get a different result. The player with the highest point total wins. Ties broken in favor of the team higher in the league table. Tuesday to Thursday – Action days. In each of these days, you take a single action (see below). For each day, you can also spend two green discs to take an additional card action. The base action options are:

Football Manager Board Game - Portal Games Eleven: Football Manager Board Game - Portal Games

Whenever the match day arrives, first read the Scout Report on your Opponent card. It will tell you what formation your opponents will play. Then play one Tactic Card of your choice from your hand and place the Jersey markers in the 9 Play Zones on the Match board according to it. At this point, you can assign the Players you have transferred to specific Jersey markers, which will allow you to use their special effects. Final Score: 3.5 stars – A solid football manager simulator that does a nice job of delivering on its theme. It’s best at one or two players, but too long at three and four.The gameplay of Eleven takes place over 6 Weeks, and each day marks a different phase of the game. On Monday, you acquire Resources for your Club and draw a Board Meeting card, facing the tasks assigned to it. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are filled with many responsibilities: transfers of players, hiring staff, expansion of the stadium, etc. Friday is the decisive day – the day of the Match. This is when you’ll manage your Tactics cards and Player abilities to win the game. The phases of Monday and Friday are resolved simultaneously, but Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday you will play in turns with other players. Use a Card action – You can take an action listed on a staff or director card; turn the card 90 degrees to show that it has been used this week. The rules feel fairly complete, but there are some things which are not clearly spelled out. As I mentioned earlier, there have been plenty of questions asked on BGG (over 120 at the time of this review), and many of them have been answered by the designer. At some point, it would be nice to have a collated FAQ or maybe an updated ruleset put out. The biggest rule that I kept screwing up early on is that you are not allowed to change the side of shirt showing other than purchasing a new player or when an action specifically allows it. I kept trying to put my IRL soccer knowledge into the game, when I should have just been following the rules as written – and in defense of the rules, it tells you explicitly in at least two places that you shouldn’t flip over shirts… The next three days comprise the nuts and bolts of preparing your team for this weekend’s matchup. This is done through a traditional action selection system, where each player gets one main action, and can potentially trigger actions on cards in their tableau if they have the resources for it. These main actions include buying a player, selling a player, hiring staff (such as a trainer, an agent, a scout, etc.), bringing on a sponsor, building out your stadium, or using a card ability. Card abilities can also act as bonus actions as well if paid for with the “operations” resource. The central market, where you can hire staff, buy players, and bring on sponsors

Your first look at Eleven: Football Manager in board game

I don’t know whether the box art of Eleven is a knowing nod to Gareth Southgate’s waistcoat and long sleeve shirt look, but it immediately gives me nostalgia of that warm summer night watching events unfold at the Spartak Stadium in Moscow where England won their first penalty shoot-out for what feels like an eternity. If you feel your blood boiling at the very idea of such ludological injustice, Eleven isn’t for you. Personally, I’m a big fan of these two mechanisms in particular. Sport is affected by all kinds of things outside of people’s control, and it feels great on a thematic level to have the same chaos sewn into the game’s finery. There’s no denying, it can feel desperately unfair at times, but “that’s football.” Final thoughtsSo again, once the game is set up – you will play 6 rounds; each one corresponding to a week in the life of your club. In each week, there are 5 turns, the first day being a setup day, the middle three representing a regular weekday and the final turn being the matchday that comes on the weekend. After more than a dozen games, I have found a few things which deserve to be mentioned – if only to help others play the game more easily. First, the stat marker icons and the resource icons are…. Not good. The resources are the icon alone while the stat icon is the resource in a solid circle. This can be really confusing at times as the wooden disc used to represent the resource is a round token. It could have been so much less confusing if the player board used squares instead of circles to denote the stat, and then the icon could have been a square as well. Like I said, I feel like I’m a veteran with a lot of game experience, and I still find myself sometimes making an error with these confusing icons. Once six weeks have transpired, you’ll add up points for various staff members (a little set-collection element wedged in there, just for fun), your club’s final position on the league table, and any points gained from stadium improvements, and the highest score wins the game. In a solo game, Eleven provides a nice batch of narrative scenarios where your club’s goals for victory may differ, and your success is rated against a scoring spectrum, but the gist is roughly the same. Your central player board, which shows your weekly income & costs, staff, and board of directors Game Experience:

Football Manager Board Game by Portal Games Eleven: Football Manager Board Game by Portal Games

Eleven’s clean engine-building is tempered by several things that are completely out of your control. Right at the start of each round (Monday, in the game’s parlance), you draw a board meeting card and then roll a die. When you compare the result to your directors’ cards, it’ll tell you which of the three outcomes on the board meeting card came to pass. The board meeting card isn’t shared, however. Each player draws their own, and the outcomes can vary quite a lot. Some are positive, some not-so-positive. I should start by saying that I’m a huge soccer fan. I’ve spent far too much time trying to find my “perfect” soccer match simulation game; and to date, I haven’t found it. That crazy quest certainly got me very interested and excited about Eleven – but as I mentioned at the start – this is not really a simulation game; it is an economic game about running a soccer club. Yes, there are matches involved in the process of the game, but it is certainly not the focus. In addition, with the unusual timing of the World Cup this winter, I’ve been thinking about soccer pretty much all the time right now… 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.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. 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. Before I start explaining the game, I think it is important to start out by saying that while the game is very thematic, no previous knowledge of soccer/football is required to play or enjoy the game. 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. In fact, as I’ll outline later, knowledge of how football matches are played may actually be a detriment!

Superclub – The football manager board game

Monday – Setup day: Players first get production, taking wooden markers matching the stat markers at the bottom of their director board. As you play the game, you will need to be very careful with the iconography. A full colored circle with the resource icon within it means an increase to your statistic while the resource icon alone means the actual resource (wooden disc). The day is finished by having a board meeting. Each player is given an event card at random. There are three options on the card (denoted by yellow, blue or red areas on the card). The player rolls a d6 and then looks at the charts on the side of his director cards. The votes are tallied, and whichever color has the most votes is what happens. If you don’t like the result, you can spend one of your red discs to re-roll the die. This can be done as long as you have red tokens to spend. Apply the results of your event card as directed. Playing Eleven is undoubtedly an enjoyable experience. The question is, for how long does it remain enjoyable? As I hinted at the very beginning of the gameplay section, game length is very dependent on player count. As a solo game, Eleven sings. 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. But I will say, I did enjoy soloing this game, and it almost felt like its natural state. I enjoyed hiring new staff members, buying unproven young talent, and then training them into fully developed superstars. 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. Eleven is very much a solid multiplayer solitaire game, which explains why the game works so well as an actual solo game. The football table, showing the league standings Build Stadium Infrastructure – you can build adboards (to allow for more advertising), stands (to allow more fans) or other improvements which allow for one-time stat advances. You can also build office expansions for endgame points. Eleven is an engine-builder at heart. Most of the time you’re trying to mould your staff into producing each of the four main currencies in the game: budget, fan base, operations, and fitness. As per the Euro standard, each of these has a level of income per round, and each can be boosted with the correct staff. What makes Eleven an outsider in comparison to most recent Euro games is the fact that you can’t really min-max your stats. Eleven is a 1-4 player economic strategy game. You will oversee a football team for one season. In that time you will be responsible for transfers, hiring staff, securing sponsorship, and basically making sure the club is managed to meet its expectations. There are also a number of starting scenarios. These are varying from overhauling an ageing squad to meeting tight deadlines in completing expansion work of the club’s stadium. No stone has been left unturned by designer Thomas Jansen. He has already flexed his football-themed board game muscles with 2017’s co-operative/solo game Club Stories.

About Dale Yu

Additionally, a few production decisions hurt the game, in my opinion. Moving opponents’ club shields on the league table was annoying and fiddly. The cards representing the opponents you play against didn’t match the color of the shields, so it was unnecessarily confusing when you were trying to find the correct shield to move up the table. Despite these criticisms, Eleven is a great game, and certainly the best football (soccer) game I’ve played. The theme is so well applied to the game, and the engine-building is very clear and simple in practice. 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. 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. Is the game perfect? No. Actually very far from it. There are a number of rules and component issues that have become apparent. I’m on the fence about trying to devise my own home brew rules for the match resolution phase; though for now, I’m happy to accept that it’s not a realistic soccer simulation, and I’m just working with the rules as the designer has written for now… I’m part of a huge group of people who enjoy sport manager games on the computer. I’ve bought countless versions of Football Manager, and I shudder to think how many hours of my life were spent searching for wunderkinder from unknown leagues around the world. Eleven takes a similar approach to the Football Manager games, but with the key difference that there’s no choice to let the computer do all the boring stuff for you, like hire staff, find sponsors, and upgrade the stadium. Then, roll a die and consult the chart in the bottom left of the match board to see the post-game effect. Generally, if you win, better things happen than if you lose, and higher numbers are always better than lower numbers. Again, if you have a red disc, you can discard it to re-roll your die