The barriers for entry are high for a medium-weight game, which will absolutely turn some people off. This includes situations such as fielding a weak team of youngsters while trying to avoid relegation. Eleven is a strategic game by Thomas Jansen ( Club Stories, Tavern, Streetpainball ) set in the world of football. Staff, your stadium, and players all add up to cost you maintenance fees at the end of each week, so making the right decisions to help with your team and add real value to how you play matches is crucial. We try to discourage this by dealing out the cards to prevent it; but it is something that can happen – and while there are rules to deal with it, it is wonky for sure.

Eleven puts you at the head of a football team, playing six weeks – each filled with board meetings and other actions, culminating in a match day.

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. Eleven is, just like its full title says, a game about managing the goings-on of a football team, both on the pitch and especially outside of it. Hire a player (or youngster) – hire a player or youngster from the display on the table (youngsters are just from the top of their deck).

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! In one play, my salty veteran that was injured in the previous match stormed back onto the field and won the whole thing with a crucial goal.Monday – Setup day: Players first get production, taking wooden markers matching the stat markers at the bottom of their director board. Firstly, there are two decks of players – Youngsters and Regular players – with their Untrained side up. It created a rumble in online communities and united a wide group of enthusiasts who hoped to bear witness to tabletop’s first mainstream hobbyist soccer title. While I generally was okay with this, especially at times where decisions got crunchy, I felt the theme suffered; no longer was I a football manager, but a gamer pushing cubes instead. 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.