Which begs the question – what do you do for the rest of the time?

Football manager

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.

Before we go much further, I should probably let you know that Eleven is a Euro game, through and through. There’s no harking back to the granddaddy of football games – Subbuteo – even though I was a huge fan of the flicking football fun when I was around 14 years old. Seriously, I had a roll-up astroturf pitch, box mondial goals, and Adidas Tango balls. Yeah, that’s right, look impressed.

Eleven is an engine-builder at heart. 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. As per the Euro standard, each of these has a level of income per round, and each can be boosted with the correct staff. What makes Eleven an outsider in comparison to most recent Euro games is the fact that you can’t really min-max your stats.

Stadium infrastructure grants you bonuses, but costs money. Players picked for game day need fitness. Fans fill the stadium and grant you more income. This all makes sense thematically, but it forges pretty rigid chains of dependence, in a similar way to the way On Mars (review here) does it. Each resource underpins another, and you need all of them. The differences between players come in how you fine-tune your engines and make the most of the staff you have.

Hardly Kane and Cristianot Ronaldo

As a devotee of the Winning Eleven / Pro Evo games from Konami, back when Fifa ruled the roost, I know first-hand that official team and player licences don’t always make the game. If you wanted Liverpool and Man City instead of Merseyside Red and Man Blue, you had to put in the time to edit the rosters. Eleven doesn’t even have a hint of a licence, but it doesn’t matter. For a start, the teams would be out of date immediately, and a board game isn’t easily patched over the internet.

You aren’t dealing with named players and famous teams in Eleven, but you don’t need to. 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. During the matches, it’s a case of setting up your team and choosing a formation and tactics, which players going on the wings, up-front, in defence etc., and then flipping the opponent card to see how they’ve set up. There are clues on the back of the opponent’s card, letting you know where they are strong and weak, so it’s not like going into a fight with a blindfold on. If you have the higher stats in one place, you score, if they do, they score. It’s not difficult to work out.

Despite the very thin implementation of the matches, handling your squad is actually pretty cool. There are nameless youth stars you can recruit, waiting for the surprise of the player they can become with your investment. There are veteran players, who add to the team’s strength while they’re not quite ready to be put out to pasture. You have a full set of jersey numbers to assign to your players, but each player comes with their own chosen number too (the divas), so there’s often no point in hiring two number 10s for example, as only one can play. 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.

The Hand of God

There’s one facet of Eleven which might drive a wedge between the football and Euro game fans.

Luck.

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.

A similar fate awaits you after each match when you make a Match Consequence roll. 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. There’s no guarantee that a win will get you good consequences. You could win the match and roll a 1 and end up with a double serious injury to apply to your players, while someone else loses, rolls a 6, and takes two temporary strength boosts into the next week.

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

I’m so pleased that Eleven doesn’t try to recreate a game of football on my table. Other games have done it in the past, and continue to. UND1C1 and Counter Attack do a great job. Instead, it’s a Euro game where the football theme has been applied with a sopping-wet brush. The biggest criticism I have for Eleven is that out-of-the-box, you can’t do the one thing you might expect in a football game. You can’t have a match against the other players. It feels like a big ‘oof’ moment from Portal Games here. Instead, you each play against different teams in the same league to try to come out on top. There’s nothing to stop you lining your team up against your opponent, but it’s just too random to have any tactical merit.

There are a few mini-expansions which add to the game, and the International Cup in particular adds those player vs player rules. Some of the others are decent, too: the International Players and Solo Campaign expansions in particular add some nice things. I think Solo is where you’ll have the most fun with Eleven, to be honest. Two-player is good fun, but I think four would drag it out, and the disparity in luck could see one player wipe the floor with the others.

Despite these criticisms, Eleven is a great game, and certainly the best football (soccer) game I’ve played. The theme is so well applied to the game, and the engine-building is very clear and simple in practice. There’s plenty of depth and nuance as to how you apply the various effects, but the iconography throughout is excellent, so accomplishing what you want to is down to whether your tactics work, not because you didn’t understand what a certain card or effect did. The way that injuries and card suspensions work fits perfectly, and the game is a fantastic choice for someone who craves that Football Manager experience on a table, instead of a screen.

Review copy kindly provided by Portal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

You can buy Eleven now, at Punchboard’s partner store, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for an account using this link – kienda.co.uk/punchboard – to snag 5% off your first £60+ order.

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Eleven: Football Manager Board Game (2022)

Designer: Thomas Jansen
Publisher: Portal Games
Art: Mateusz Kopacz, Hanna Kuik
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Eleven Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Pointing and painting

If you’ve been into board games for a while, there’s a chance you’ve heard of Basilica before. When it was originally released in 2010 it was warmly received, but failed to make a big splash. For this revised version Portal have given the game a little bit of a spruce up, but the core mechanisms are the same. Even the tile artwork remains unchanged.

The idea of the game is to help build a cathedral between the two of you, taking actions, placing builders, and trying to make the most of the colourful ceilings. You do it by placing a succession of square tiles into one of the five columns on offer, trying to create areas of contiguous colours. If you’ve got more builders in a coloured area than your opponent, you control it, and you get the points when scoring is triggered.

There are two rows of three tiles in the market area. If you take one from the top row you carry out the action on it e.g. place a builder, upgrade one, move a builder. If you take a coloured one from the bottom row you add it to the other tiles, making the cathedral bigger. Any time a coloured tile is taken, the action tile above it flips over, taking its place. If it sounds simple, it’s because it is. Turns are fast and fluid, and there’s nothing obfuscated or overly complicated. It’s perfect for a two-player-only game, where mind games are meant to take centre stage.

Cowboy builder

Let’s get the niggles out of the way first. First is the theme, which is as thin as a partition wall. There’s no feeling of constructing a cathedral at all. This is an abstract game at heart, and any number of themes could have been applied just as easily. Adding flowers to a garden, building a disco floor, or making stained glass windows would have worked just as well. It doesn’t really matter when you get down to brass tacks – it’s just an abstract game that didn’t want to be naked.

The other thing I find frustrating is a practical problem more than a setting or aesthetic one. The two rows of tiles sit in gaps on either side of a centre cardboard bar. The problem is that the gaps only just fit three tiles side-by-side, and when you either take one, flip one to the bottom row, or add a fresh one to the top row, it’s almost impossible to not mess the display up. The original version of Basilica had both rows sat on top of a board, which – although prone to tiles moving – is still preferable to having the whole display and the tiles moving.

Fortunately, those are the only negatives I have with Basilica, and the game itself more than makes up for those shortcomings.

Master mason

The competition over control of areas in Basilica is great. It’s like someone played Carcassonne, loved the Farmer scoring mechanism from it, and decided to make a whole game from it. There are times when you’re sitting pretty, your builders commanding a sea of tiles, and it feels like you’ve got the game in the bag, only for the other player to bring your glorious vaulted ceilings crashing down around you.

There are actions which let you slide builders from one tile to an adjacent one, which can completely swing the board state. The Confuse action lets you take one of your builders back off the tiles, into your supply, while moving an opposing builder to another tile, whereas Disaster actions let you completely remove a tile. The way things swing back and forth is a lot of fun, and it never devolves into complete chaos.

There’s a really clever feature which gives each player a coin to begin with. Most of the actions available have an optional paid action that the inactive player can do, either benefitting from the same action or mitigating the ill effects of others. To take one of these paid actions, that player has to give the other person their coin, giving that person twice the spending power they had before. It’s a really clever idea, and I love the bitter taste of money not going to the supply, but instead to the last person in the world you want to have it.

The two-colour tiles are another little piece of genius that blow the whole game open. There are times when you’ll drop one on the table, linking two previously unconnected areas, and dominating them with builders who otherwise would have had no influence. Again, none of these situations is unforeseeable. Everything is right there, on the table, in plain sight, so when something goes wrong for you, you’ve no one to blame but yourself and your own magnificent ineptitude.

Final thoughts

Basilica finds itself in a pigeonhole I happen to be a big fan of: tactical, rules-light, two-player games full of interaction. I’ve reviewed Targi and Watergate here before, and both have permanent places in my collection. Basilica is another example of how to make a two-player game well. The tile holder/board thing does annoy me, but it’s far from a show-stopper. I just don’t play with it at all now.

Elbowing one another out of the way, actions full of spite, and glorious gloating might not actually sound like a recipe for friendship. In fact, now that I write it, it really isn’t, is it? But between friends, or even better, partners, it’s great. There’s something therapeutic about having an hour put aside to engage in something so competitive with someone you know. Games where you can directly screw someone over, don’t make for good icebreakers with people you don’t know.

There’s a small expansion included which adds a new type of tile, and it offers enough variety to spice things up a bit, without making it any more complicated. Honestly, after playing the base game once or twice, I’d suggest adding the expansion every time you play. My wife isn’t the biggest gamer in the world, but even she was saying how much she was enjoying it during our first play, which makes it a winner in my book. Basilica is a great choice if two-player games are your thing, and you’re looking for something to add to the likes of 7 Wonders: Duel in your collection. I just hope it doesn’t get lost in the Essen noise.

Review copy kindly provided by Portal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Basilica (2022)

Designer: Łukasz M. Pogoda
Publisher: Portal Games
Art: Juan Pablo Fuentes Ruiz
Players: 2
Playing time: 45 mins

The post Basilica Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Gutenberg takes its name from Johannes Gutenberg, the German printer and inventor who gave his name to the movable-type printing press, which brought about the printing revolution in Europe. Its invention is considered one of the pivotal moments of the second millennium, so he’s kind of a big deal. Especially because developing printing workshops in 15th Century Germany is the perfect setting for a board game.

The gears of industry

The first thing you’ll notice when you see Gutenberg on the table are the cardboard gears. I dare you to not play with the cogs, making them spin, as if you were two-years-old playing with a Fisher Price toy. It’s a toy factor which really helps sell the game to players. Euros can be here-comes-a-hosepipe-ban dry, so anything which makes the game a bit more ‘fun’ is great. It’s especially good when the game in question is pretty much bang in the middle of medium-weight complexity.

Each player takes the role of one of the early printing pioneers, and the aim of the game is to complete printing orders. You need to invest in type-blocks, inks, patrons, and your levels in various specialties, in order to be the best. The gears I mentioned above are more than just decorative – they give you once-per-round abilities too. Choosing which to take, and lining them up well is important, because the first thing you do each round is to rotate the top one to the next section, causing that oh-so-satisfying chain reaction.

If this is all sounding like any other Euro at the moment, I can understand why. Other than the turning gears, there’s not much new acting as grease between them, making Gutenberg stand out from the crowd. And that’s where we take a look at the little player screens and the multitude of small black cubes in the box.

Bookmakers or book-makers?

There are five different actions you can take in each round of Gutenberg, but the resources on offer vary in usefulness. Instead of just taking turns in order everything is up for grabs, it just depends how much you want it.

At the start of a round, each player has a number of black cubes to insert into a series of tracks on a little board behind their screens. When the screens are whipped away, the player with the most cubes in each track gets first pick for that action. Where it gets really clever is how ties are broken. The First Player in each round has fewer cubes to spend than the next person, who has fewer than the next, and so on. Predicting what the other players are going bid for is the key to doing well, and it’s really tricky.

I love how thematic the pieces of the game feel. The wooden type-blocks are absolutely gorgeous, so tactile, and the little cardboard component boxes look just like an old-fashioned type case. When you take all of that into consideration, and those fun gears, it makes me wonder why the ink tokens are these tiny, fiddly, little cardboard tokens. I’ve got big hands, and they’re no fun to handle. It’s crying out for a blinged-up set of plastic ink drops.

Sans serif

Gutenberg gets a lot right when it comes to game design. It’s very easy to teach, and to learn, and the design decisions are a big part of that. For example, the actions are represented with horizontal rows of things on the board, and the rows are duplicated on the little boards you use to bid for turn order. There’s no trying to remember where you can do what, or in what order. You just work from top to bottom. It’s very elegant.

The double-sided board and the way the actions work mean that the game is identical whether you’re playing with two, three, or four players. I like it best at four, however, because the drama of the secret bidding is multiplied. You also get to see more of the different gears and patronage cards. The solo game works nicely enough, but so much of the fun is derived from what happens behind the screens, that a bit of the soul of Gutenberg is sapped when played solitaire.

Unless you’re playing with newcomers to board games, I’d recommend ignoring the rulebook, and using the character tiles in your first game, and every game in fact. It adds a little asymmetry which makes things a bit more interesting. With newbies though, it’s enough to play without. I like that there’s plenty of emergent strategy too. As you get more familiar with the game, you’ll find yourself playing quite differently to your first few games.

Final thoughts

Gutenberg then. It’s a cracking medium-weight game, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s quick to teach, it’s easy to learn, and it’s got a great table presence. If it gets the exposure it deserves, I can see it being one of those games that gets recommended to everyone new to the hobby, in the same way games like Azul, Pandemic, and Quacks are. Love or hate the expression, it makes a fantastic gateway game.

If you like your strategy games heavy, Gutenberg might not keep your attention for a lot of repeated play, There aren’t enough gears to mesh in your plans, despite the inclusion of actual gears in the game. But if you want a game that will get pulled out again and again at games nights, conventions, and family gatherings, Gutenberg is a fantastic choice.

With any luck, Portal’s decision to publish it means that it’ll get far more exposure than it ever would have with just Granna behind it. Portal had a stand at the recent UK Games Expo (show report here) with a huge stack of Gutenberg boxes. By the end of the first day, it was already down to very limited stock – this is one to keep an eye on.

(fun fact: the editor I’m writing this review in is named Gutenberg too!)

Review copy kindly provided by Portal Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Gutenberg is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Gutenberg (2021)

Designers: Katarzyna Cioch, Wojciech Wiśniewski
Publishers: Granna, Portal Games
Art: Rafał Szłapa
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Gutenberg Review appeared first on Punchboard.