Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

Product Information

You keep up to 1 red, blue and green disc between weeks, though you’re allowed to keep all your money. Prepare – look at the top card of your opponent deck to read the scouting report on the team you are about to play. 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. In fact, as I’ll outline later, knowledge of how football matches are played may actually be a detriment!

The author is also very active on BGG, and he is pretty quick to answer questions posted there; so if you get stuck on something, the question has likely already been asked by someone and already answered by the designer… But, after that, the rules are easily grokked and you’ll move smoothly through the different steps. Your fitness is what you need to make sure your players are fit to play, but you can also train them.Some of the others are decent, too: the International Players and Solo Campaign expansions in particular add some nice things. 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. It’s a bit of a hog in general, requiring a large central area for all of the market decks in addition to multiple individual player boards. During the six weeks of competition, you will be racing against other players on the League Table board . In my opinion, this game took the original Club Stories game and added a lot of elements that made Robinson Crusoe such a memorable experience.

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. Eleven’s clean engine-building is tempered by several things that are completely out of your control. Our ultimate guide to board game cafes has everything you need to know about what a board game cafe is, or how to find one in your area!

Within each third of the field, you can choose which shirts are in the center, and you are allowed to place up to one shirt in each wing (outside) area. If you enjoy what I’m doing and want to support my efforts, please consider dropping off a tip at my Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon. The solo mode includes six different scenarios that challenge players with different starting situations and goals for the season. The stadium board starts mostly empty, though a few sponsor spaces are pre-printed filled in on the board.

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. 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. This is also one of the strongest bids in Portal’s catalog of fulfilling their promise of “Board Games That Tell Stories. 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. 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.It just, IMHO, increases the value of an offensive player – and players will have to adjust their actions accordingly. The differences between players come in how you fine-tune your engines and make the most of the staff you have. You will run though most of the player and youngster cards each game; but these cards are more about getting used/bought/sold at the right time. After setting your players up on the pitch, you flip the opponent’s card and then compare zones of opposing players to determine if goals are scored or not. Better yet, perhaps one of your star players is creating a ruckus and you have the option to loan them out to another club.

It’s difficult to ascertain how significant this issue is, as you can choose to turn a blind eye, but it’s most accurately compared to the dreaded Halifax Hammer in Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow. Win, lose or draw, you check the result of your roll on the results table, and see what lingering effects carry over into the next week.

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.