Eleven: Football Manager Board Game

Product Information

The theme is so well applied to the game, and the engine-building is very clear and simple in practice. Combine all of this with the various tactic and formation cards on offer, and matchday feels more like an event, not an anti-climax at the end of the week. Each of these cards gives some special abilities as well as a colored dice chart which shows how they will vote on events. 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. Eleven was a huge success during the crowdfunding campaign, gaining nearly 4,000 backers on Gamefound.

The clever bit of these event cards is that they encapsulate the extended design philosophy of the whole, presenting Thomas Jansen’s ideals up front with complete clarity. 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. 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. Furthermore, the market display can get large as well with three separate five-card markets and the league standing board as well.

When managing the club, you will use 80 Resource markers and over 70 tokens – Strength, Weakness, Injury and Suspension , as well as 28 Stadium Infrastructure tokens .

It’s the evocative punch captured by the board meeting, and it’s an approach and spirit that is carried through the rest of the design.The game was similar to the Franchise mode in the Madden franchise of video games, where players could focus more on how a team plays each game than the playing of the sport itself.

You may have more than one of these, and some have additional powers you can execute after the opponent’s team is fully revealed. I’ve spent far too much time trying to find my “perfect” soccer match simulation game; and to date, I haven’t found it. 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. 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. But beyond the beautiful game, I love the drama of leagues and their destinies, the players and their advancement, and the teams and their rise and fall.Instead, you’re kept subservient to their wishes, tossed under the metaphorical bus and forced to deal with the fallout. In all honesty, it could very easily be re-skinned into almost any other team sport, and the only tweaks would come in the match section.