NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager

Shame about the predetermined match results, otherwise this would be a fantastic game. Went into a match where a series of events played out that had 0.1% odds, and proceeded to restart only to have the exact same series of events play out. Having that happen twice in a row are the same odds of getting struck by lightening... frustrating.

TOP !

the most approachable management sim i've played in a while, systems are deep but not hard to understand and there's not constant juggling. plays great with controller!

pretty addictive

nice

it is good

This game is really fantastic and has a lot of potential to be even better, though there is plenty in the game I haven't gotten to yet. It's one of those games that is a little bit hard to describe, so it's a lucky thing there's a demo -- if you're anything like me, as soon as you get a taste of the gameplay loop in the demo you'll want to buy the game. The highest compliment I can give this is that I'm not even really a fan of football - I'm from the US, though, and I like it better, at least, than our version of "football" - and management games can be fun to me but are often hit and miss. This manages to give you a version of playing out matches using a probabilistic next-action tree that is influenced by your players' abilities and your playing cards to shift the probabilities. You don't see any actual soccer being played, just this series of cards, but this game manages to make that process really, really fun, with a lot of depth and variety. I also don't know anything much about the UK, the first club I unlocked was Torquay because I remember that from a Monty Python sketch. But even without knowing much about any of that, the game's atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting, from the components and 'game pieces' that make up the card game aspect of it, to the things that show up on your early-80s computer terminal, to the sound effects, you very much feel like you know what it's like to be a relatively low-rent football manager in early-80s Britain. If you enjoy sports games, management games, autobattlers, you'll probably enjoy this, unless you play sports games mostly for the action, in which case this could miss completely for you. It is perfect for those of us whose reflexes no longer support being any good at what used to be known as the FIFA games. The only little adjustment i'd make is to not brand it as a deckbuilding game, because it's not so much of one, to be perfectly honest. it still does include some card creation, curation, and card play, but the 'building' part of the cards you get seems to be mostly limited to getting a preset few cards from whatever type of coach you have on staff, and even then, each card is basically "increase control, defense, attack, goalkeeping, or stamina by a certain amount while in game" though thru combining cards you do sometimes get something that's more useful than the basic rote cards of each type. there still don't seem to be many and they also only stay with you as long as the player or coach that's bringing that card to the table is with you Overall I'd say 4.5/5, I'm quite hooked and I'm looking forward to when I can finally move on from Torquay to hopefully something else from British television and film and books I've consumed over the years, because I'm out of ideas otherwise!