Superclub – Das Fußballmanager-Brettspiel

Product Information

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. Just Quality “Such a good Game really! Week in week out playing hours with my friends! They thought about every detail!” — Nolav 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.

Superclub - The football manager board game

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. 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. Its a good Demo, but for me it would be interesting, to have stronger opponents (and just a pvp element, what easy could be implemented with player cards). For me its a really good game, but needs some work on the Matchday engine. 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.

Popular expansions

The player with the highest point total wins. Ties broken in favor of the team higher in the league table. Despite its length (still about 60-75 minutes for me), this is possibly my most played game since coming home from SPIEL 2022. The competitive game is fun, but it also has a really good solo version where you are faced with challenges on a scenario card. As such, I’ve played this at regular game nights, at weekend cons, and on lonely rainy nights at home by myself; and I’ve truly enjoyed it in all settings. 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.). 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. Eleven can be played multiplayer or solo. The solo mode includes six different scenarios that challenge players with different starting situations and goals for the season. In the beginning, the task is simple: You have to climb the steps of the football leagues and achieve the appropriate experience. You may have to manage the club in a crisis, and at other times you will have to rejuvenate a football team of players that are not so young anymore. You may also have to fight against time to try to complete the stadium before the deadline!

Superclub – The football manager board game

Zatu has an excellent range of games and for most of them the best prices too. Delivery is always fast and I have never received a game in bad condition. 10/10 would recommend.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. As addictive as Football Manager “Football Manager introduced an addictiveness rating to their game that was both accurate and funny “Remember to eat” etc. This board game needs the same addictiveness rating. It’s that good.” — Mark 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. 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 If you’re only interested in receiving the newest games this is the box for you; guaranteeing only the latest games! Buy New Releases Box »

Arsenal joins leading football manager board game

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. 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: 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. A few critiques are worth mentioning. Tactics cards are crucial to winning matches. Each player starts with only one and there are not enough ways to acquire more. 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. The full player layout, a nice presence, but quite the table hog Marcel, i don’t know if weird is the right word… but it’s just the way the game works. The AI teams are tiered into different levels of difficulty, and this gives all the human players a level field each week as they will always be playing teams of equal difficulty; this could not be said if the humans had to play each other.

About Dale Yu

But every team knows that to be the best in the league it takes a lot more – it takes an incredible manager. Eleven is an economic strategy game set in a world of sport.” In this game, you take control of a soccer club over a six week season; each week being played over the course of one of the six rounds in the game. To start out the week, you’ll spend three days (turns) taking actions to improve your club – hiring players, improving facilities, employing staff members or seeking out advertising sponsors. 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…

Football Manager Board Game - Zatu Games Superclub - The Football Manager Board Game - Zatu Games

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 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.Sell a player (or youngster) – discard a card you already own, gaining 2 money plus one money per current strength level as well as money for any VP tokens placed on the card. If you are selling a player who is currently hurt or suspended, you only get half of their value. Contract a Sponsor – you can add sponsors for your shirt logo or onto the adboards in your stadium (assuming you have empty adboards). You can also have one-time media ads. Each of these varieties provides different amounts of money/increase to your money stat/or other special abilities. This is listed on each card. As with the other markets, you are only able to access the rightmost three cards in the display. You’ll be governing your club’s finances, planning match tactics, transferring players, hiring staff, building a fan base, and investing in your club’s infrastructure. Through accumulating more cash, fans, and ‘team spirit’, you’ll be able to afford the best players and boost their performance during matches, while enhancing your home stadium with more stands, training grounds, lighting, and ads.