Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

Product Information

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. 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! 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 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.

All the staff cards give you powers, and also aid in scoring at game end, thanks to the only gamified portion of Eleven that feels too much like a board game: a set collection element built into each of the game’s five color sets used on staff cards. 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. Your table ends up being a mess during a game of Eleven. There’s no elegant way to keep things in their proper place, so you just have to embrace the chaos—sort of like the fan section at the old RFK Stadium during DC United games, for any MLS fans out there—when playing the game.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.).

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. 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 thoughts Sponsors are also quite interesting. 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. (You only get one of those jersey sponsors per game.) The jersey sponsor even has a cute way of inserting into your stadium board so that you can always see the logo of your team’s shirt. Once trained, it’s a wild mix of different things those rookies can turn out to be. Some of them are fantastic, some have special powers, and some of them aren’t very good! You never know what you’ll get with a rookie, exactly like in real life.I mean, literally clear your game table. You’ll need every last square inch of it if you want to give Eleven enough space to shine, particularly at the full player count of four. 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. If you need even more Eleven, Portal has you covered with not one, not two, but FIVE expansions adding bits and pieces to each play. While I have no idea who has the table space for all that, I like that there are already pieces that can be added for hardcore soccer junkies. I think the base game has plenty, but I do think there’s room for adding different modules to your stadium, different events, and different staff card abilities to keep play fresh. Much like the mess of stuff lying around, Eleven is a bit of a rules hog, particularly around the Matchday rules, which we will get to. The barriers for entry are high for a medium-weight game, which will absolutely turn some people off. I had to read this rulebook four times to gather everything that needs to be done and the edge rules around the matches.