Club Manager Board Game Preview

This is a preview copy sent to us for our early opinions. No money exchanged hands. Some art, rules or components will change in the final game. Some components in this version are home made.

There are not many sports-related board games out there, are there? And the ones I have tried are generally terrible! Now, there are the odd "OK" ones, I suppose. Lots of decent racing games, for sure. But as soon as you get into mainstream sports like Football (Soccer for those west of the Atlantic), well, the options are few and far between. Club Manager from designer Colin Webster attempts to buck that trend, and on first glance at this early preview copy, I think he may be onto something.

The game works as a management simulation. You are not playing the matches; you are managing a team. Much like beloved computer management games such as Football Manager and Championship Manager, this game attempts to replicate that addictive progression-based experience and bring it to the table.

This is not about winning a few games or enjoying one or two good seasons. This is about building a legacy over time. Can you take a mediocre bottom-tier side and take them all the way to the top? That is the joy of the computer-based sims, and that is what this board game version is trying to replicate.

You start by choosing which league three team you want to begin with. In the main game, there will be four options. Here in the preview copy I have, there are two. They all have their own unique set of starting base players, a few playing cards in key positions to get you started. You will then fill the rest of the squad of 15 players with a random selection of average players. But you may get lucky with one or two!

Place your team cards down onto your player mat, setting them into their preferred positions, as shown on the cards. You can play people out of position, but they will lose power. This will give you a good idea of what you are lacking and need to get in the transfer market. This will all be a lot easier if you understand football and sim games, but it is easy enough for anyone if they don't. But I presume this game will mostly appeal to those of us who like this sport in the first place. Let the engine building begin!

The season then starts in earnest, with a very clever ring-bounded set of cards that you flip over, week by week. It shows which week you are in, if it is a matchday, and who you are playing or whatever may be going on. Pre-season, and the transfer window is open. Time to get some players for your team. Winter break? Now is the chance to stock up on some players to boost your run for promotion. Maybe it's a cup week. Time to forget about your league form, and go for glory, riches, and silverware.

It's a neat system, that keeps the game flowing, and tracks your progress in a very easy to follow way. The cards stand up too, so you can have placed in front of you as your reminder where you are in the season as you play.

During the transfer window, you can buy new players to add to your squad. You start the game with a bit of cash, but you will need to generate more as you play. You will burn through your reserve quickly! Money can be used to upgrade your stadium, medical centre, club store, training facilities, and other things, as well as buying players. Thankfully, you can also sell players and generate some cash that way, or ask your marketing team to find ways to bring in some much-needed funds. More on that soon.

Each week, you will have three workers that you can place at one of multiple locations. They can go out and buy you players, develop your youth squad, train your first team, or make you some money marketing. When you ask them to generate funds, you place them in the marketing spot and then roll the marketing die. This will most likely show you a x1 face, but you could be lucky and get a x2 face. If the Prima Donna icon shows up on the die, this means you can multiply the number of marketers in the marketing space by the number of players with the Prima Donna icon in your team. Get a few of them in, and you can make a lot of money this way.

When you place your workers into the first team training spot, you can move on the tracker here one space for each worker. When it reaches the 1-3 spot, you can then upgrade a player in your first team by one point, as long as they are currently in the 1-3 ability level. If you have higher ability players that need training, you need to push the marker one more spot.

Buying players is simple. Place a worker into the transfer market location. Then choose any of the players currently available in the market. You can buy them for their face value multiplied by two. When you sell, you just get the face value. So pick wisely. Each player will also show a few other key pieces of data you will need to check. Let's take a look more closely at the playing cards.

Let's look at Kuric. He has a current ability of 8. He can improve this by one level, that's the plus one. He can be developed this way for the first four seasons of your game. After that, he is locked in at 8. He will play for you for ten seasons, then retire. Which is great, the game lasts ten seasons! But as you can see, the other players will retire after five or six seasons respectively.

On the bottom, you can see the positions they play. This will all make sense to football fans, but if not, don't worry. It matches the spaces you can use on your player board. Just place them down on the spaces matching these positions. Then finally, on the bottom right, it shows any special powers they have. The star means they are a flair player. There is also a shield which means strength. Each game you want to try and have the most flair players versus the opposition's strength players, and vice versa. This will allow you to draw more goal-scoring cards during matches, but more on that later.

The cross means they are injury-prone and could get injured after a game. The three little people mean they are a leader and could be your captain. Only players with this characteristic can be your captain, and anyone you designate as your skipper will get a plus one boost. The exclamation mark means they are a butcher. This means they could be suspended after the game. Again, more on that later. And finally, the pound sign is the prima donna icon. Helpful as mentioned in making more money from your marketing team, but if they don't get into your match day squad, you lose one in your morale. And at the end of the season, if you don't get promoted, you will lose these players.

OK! You have built up your team of winners, made a few quid, and developed your promising young striker, and you are ready to play! How do match days work? Well, you still get to place your three workers out, so you can make final adjustments to your training, or perhaps grab a tactical advantage with a Scouting report or Tactical work. Here you can draw a card that you can use in games. More on that soon. But let's take a look at an actual match, as that is the meat of this game.

You are always team one, in solo anyway. In two-player, it will be team one and two in the game. So here, player one is playing team 8, and player two, if in the game, is playing team seven, and so on. Take the respective cards from the league you are in, and look at their strengths and weaknesses.

You've been drawn against team eight, Thornliebank. They have a strength of 13 on their left side, 17 down the middle, and 13 on the right. Their keeper has a strength of four, their defence is nine, midfield 10, and the attack is 13. They have two Flair players in their team, but no Strength players. Hopefully, that all makes sense when looking at their card.

So, it is time to set up your team to take advantage of their weaknesses and defend against their strengths. If possible, perhaps you want to overload the middle to match their strong centre, and then see if you can get a high attack rating to go hard against their relatively weak defence of nine. You can adjust the players you pick for each game and the positions they will play. For example, Duncan in the cards above can play either right forward or left forward. You could move him now to boost the area you need most. Although, of course, in league three, there is no chance you have a player this good! But even the lesser players have the ability to play in multiple positions. You can track your own score in your head, or there is a handy online tool you can use; it looks like this.

This was my team at the end of Season two, when I was promoted into league two from league three. At this point, my star striker was out injured, so I had a back up there, but other than this, you can see how easy it is to enter the scores for your 11 players, and then see your relative scores from your forwards, midfielders, defenders, and then the left, right and centre.

Once you have worked these scores out, you will then play the match! There is a handy guide which shows you through ten phases of a game. First, you score your left side vs the opposition's right. Then the centre vs centre, and so on. You will also compare the number of your flair players vs their strength players and vice versa, and then pick one area to score a second time. Then the home team can also take one extra card for being the home side. And if your morale is high enough, you get another card this way too.

Once you have compared scores, you then roll two D12 dice. You will take the scores of the die roll plus your score for the area being checked and compare it to your opponent. So, for example, if your right side has a score of 11, and the opposition has a score of 13 on the left, as is the case here, they have a plus 2. Roll the dice, and if you don't roll at least three higher than them, they win. Roll two higher and it's a draw, no one wins. If there is a winner, they draw a card. Cards can be misses, saves, or goals! There are also counterattacks, which means the losing team for that draw now draws a second card. There are ties when you need to roll a D12 again to see if you can roll higher than the keeper score you are facing, and goals that, after a VAR check (a ridiculous use of video reffing used in modern football that everyone hates), can end up not being goals after all!

This part of the game is obviously very luck-based. You could flip miss after miss, and your opponent draw nothing but goals. There is nothing you can do there. But there is obviously a lot of mitigation prior to that, with the squad of players you built, the team you picked, the positions you played them in, and then the cards you can use to help you. Remember those tactics and scouting reports?

These cards can be used to help you re-roll dice or boost certain areas of the pitch when needed. The scouting report must be used in the next match; the tactics cards can be saved up and used as and when needed.

There is a lot you can do that will make you feel in control of the game, right up to the card draw. But then, it is very much about the luck of the draw, which I am not a fan of. Of course, over the ten tests each match, the best team will generally win. If you win more than your fair share, you can draw more cards overall. But still, a lesser team can beat a better team. But that's football! Over the course of the seasons, you would hope the luck will even out. But of course, that is not always the case. But in my experience, it is mostly what happens. However, I would like to see some mitigation here for the card draws in the final game.

I am happy to win or lose the odd game against the AI if I play, but to lose a league title or cup final due to a few unlucky draws, when I am by far the better team, just feels frustrating to me. And I would like to find a way to control that more. Perhaps that will be developed. This is a prototype after all.

Once the game is over, you will have cards everywhere, something like this! I find it a little hard to keep track of the score sometimes, especially with the Test GK skills cards, that are not always as obvious to remember post-game, if they succeeded or not. I think this needs some tweaking too. It could just be down to me not placing the cards as neatly as I could, but I feel a score tracker would help. Especially as when you get into this game, you want to fly through these ten skill checks and play the game as fast as possible.

Post-game, you will roll the post-game die. This will tell you if any injury-prone players were injured, or if any Butchers were suspended. As in this example, where Higgins, my centre back is now suspended for one match as I rolled the Butcher symbol post game. Again, this is complete luck. You could end up getting players injured or suspended all the time. Or not at all. Of course, it is up to you if you buy players with these attributes at all, but sometimes the choices are limited. But again, I suppose that is just like real football. I never had this affect me too badly. And being forced to take out a few players here and there just kept the game fresh for me. I liked being forced to bring in other players for big games. It added jeopardy and kept me on my toes.

If you played as the home team, you will now earn some cash, and if you won, some morale. More for an away win. Your morale is tracked on a separate morale tracker, and when full, allows you to draw one more chance card during the game. Place any injured or suspended players into the appropriate spot at the top of your player board, showing either negative one, two, or three, indicating how many matches/weeks they are out for. Then move on to the next week.

At the end of the season, you will either stay in the same league, get relegated, or promoted. When you get to the top league, you can start competing in European matches. And throughout, there are cup games you can play in, that put you against random opposition, and can reward highly with huge financial gains. The whole process feels just like a football management sim on a PC, and it is joyous!

When you develop a player, you will add a token over the old score, showing they have now achieved a higher level. You can, of course, then adjust your overall score when they play. Developing players this way feels very rewarding. It is a complete engine-building experience, of buying new players and developing them, that is highly rewarding. Especially when it pays off and you move up the leagues.

Developing your infrastructure is equally rewarding. You do this during the worker placement phase. Adding workers here allows you to pay money and advance one level. When your stadium is finished, you will gain extra revenue for every home game, and you can now attract better players to come play for you. Advancing Recruitment lets you gain an extra worker to play with each week, crucial if you want to do well. I advise doing this early! Youth academy lets you boost all new youth players acquired by two straight away. Medical centre gets your injured players back playing quicker. And the club store being developed allows you to gain extra cash every time you take the marketing action.

There is a lot to do. You can't do it all at once. But over ten seasons, you will be able to get most up, just pick which order to do them to see how far and quickly you can advance up the leagues. The pace of a ten-season game means you should be able to win the league and cups by your final season if you have played well most of the time. But not until the later seasons. You won't get there quickly, no matter how well you play. You need to take your time in this game. Quickest I could imagine this happening would be in six seasons. So you do need to play the long game here. Each season takes around 40 minutes when you are going with it. But there is an easy way to pack up and save your game if you need to pause for a day or two. But I found once I got going, generally I found it hard to stop! It's a very addictive process, always advancing this way. Marginal gains keep you coming back for more. Wanting to play a game with your new goalkeeper. Or see how your youth player, now developed, can help your right-hand side. It's a very addictive game in this way.

Climbing up the table after each game, gaining three points for a win, one point for a draw, just like real football, makes the season progress in a really interesting way. You only play 14 league games each season, plus the cup matches, but that's knockout; lose and you are out. There are 27 weeks in a season, and without a match to play, weeks are over in a few seconds. Assign your workers, carry out their actions, move on to the next week.

I would like three things changed or added to the final version of this game, but overall, I would say this is hands down the best football manager game I have ever played off-screen. The game captures all the elements I love about football management video games and simplifies it in a way that makes the upkeep of playing with cardboard very easy, simple, quick, and fun, but still engaging. But here is how I think it could be even better.

1. A physical way to track your current team rating. The online way is good, but I don't want my phone there, and it's awkward to see it in landscape, etc. A quicker and simpler way to track this would make games a lot more fun and quicker.

2. A physical way to track the score in the games. Perhaps an area to place goals for each side? Maybe a separate board you bring in to play on? Place your team's score here, your opponent's score there, and then flip cards from here to here if it's a miss, here for a goal?

3. Mitigation for the card flips during a game. I don't want to leave this to chance. Perhaps be able to develop players that let you pick one from the next three cards? Maybe have tactics or players that let you stop goals when scored against you, or turn misses into goals? It should be more about your players and tactics than just the flip of the card.

   

At the end of the season, you will draw three season goals and pick one for the next season. If after the next season you achieve this, you will gain a bonus. I would also like these bonuses to be a bit bigger, and have the chance to keep more than one if you want.

Other than that, this is a wonderful prototype I have been honored to try out, and I am very sad to send it back. I hope the game funds quickly and I can get a final copy again soon. It is a wonderful adaptation of something I have spent hours playing online or on my phone, and now having the chance to do the same in cardboard form feels wonderful.

It's crazy to think of these choices I have made online or in video game form now as worker placement, engine building, or hand management, but there you go. Even football can be broken down into board game mechanics!