ELEVEN
Football manage your expectations
Designer: Thomas Jansen | Publisher: Portal
Many games have taken a run at the – on the face of it, ideal – theme of football, and many have fallen to a careerending double-footed tackle in the penalty box, their top flight dreams ended by lacklustre mechanics, drab presentation, or overly-simulationist fiddly implementation – and occasionally, all three.
Eleven is a management game, where you attempt to guide your team to league success over six weeks. Every week you’ll resolve an issue facing the club, contract sponsors, refurbish your ground and facilities, hire staff and players, then at the weekend, you’ll play a match, using scouts’ reports to decide your tactics and which star players to include.
Let me tip my hand early: Eleven is very much a game of two halves. Some things it does well – superbly, in fact – and others it executes only adequately, or completely botches. As a reviewer, this feels worse than if the game had been merely bad – it’s absolutely not – but I came away feeling that with a little more care and playtesting, this might have been elevated from a cluttered, intermittently-fun game, to a much-needed classic.