If you like Football Manager, you might like… Superclub

Why might I like it?

Because it’s a good board game and good board games are wonderful.

What is it?

It’s a highly competitive two-to-four-player (six with the expansion pack) board game that challenges you to balance tactics, player acquisition, infrastructure development and the feverish compulsion to humiliate and crush your friends.

OK, you have my attention

As well I might. If it’s true that the worst of the pandemic is behind us (please be true) and that lockdowns are a thing of the past (please be a thing of the past) then we’re going to need board games. I say this as someone whose idea of a perfect Friday night is to play six hours of link-up Civilization 6 with Alex Stewart, but a good board game can often transcend a good online game. It’s an event that could take you anywhere, from the acquisition of prime West End real estate to the invasion of North America to, oddly enough, the elimination of a deadly pandemic. And it’s about sharing that event with other people.

You need the right sort of people, of course. Rage quitting is not a blight exclusive to FIFA. And you need the right sort of refreshments too. But in Joe Devine, a bottle of Malbec and a tube of BBQ Pringles, I had all of those things in place for my first game of Superclub.

Having a rather good time playing the Super Club football board game with @iain_games – who’d have thought a dice roll penalty shootout would be quite so tense… pic.twitter.com/b9pO19Na1P

— Joe Devine (@JM_Devine) September 1, 2021

You see, I wanted to do this properly. First, because I take my self-appointed position of Lord of the Games extremely seriously, but also because Superclub deserves it. It’s the brainchild of Norwegian copywriter Audun Egenberg who, according to the website, took a solo trip to a mountain cabin with no internet and sketched the whole thing out with paper and pencil. Then, with the help of his employers Tada and the Kickstarter community, he built it up from scratch. And you really have to salute that sort of thing.

So how does it work? Well, that’s exactly what you’ll ask yourself when you pull the lid off the box and look down to see stacks and stacks of multicoloured cards and folders staring back at you. This is not Ludo. It requires at least one person to invest an hour (ideally before everyone turns up at the front door) reading the rules and watching one of the nice YouTube instructional videos too. When guests arrive, they’ll almost certainly spend 15 minutes wondering what’s going on… and then it clicks.

And it clicks so hard. It may look complex, but after a couple of rounds, it becomes intuitive. You draft players to build an initial squad, you select a team from whatever you cobbled together and you play a simple and swift dice-based game against each other to score points. If you have a better team, you have more chance of success. But it is very hard to eliminate the possibility of failure. A poor team can still beat a good team with the right tactics and a little bit of luck. Which is as it should be.

The season itself flashes past in a blur. The off-season is where the game is won and lost. It’s your job to balance the needs of the team with the needs of the club. I chose to invest everything into stadium expansion, setting up a revenue stream that would pay for better players as we progressed. This would prove to be a poor strategy. Joe hedged his bets, shrewdly upgrading his scouting and training facilities. I had the better business and, for a short time at least, a slightly better team. It didn’t last.

Every player in the game, and there are hundreds, has a FIFA-like star value, but some have room for improvement. With good training facilities, you can quickly turn a two-star no-mark into a five-star legend. With better scouting, you have more opportunities to sign cut-price superstars like Garibaldi, the only ready-made six-star player in the deck. Coaches can be hired to provide special bonuses and buffs to your squad. But balance is everything. My enormous new stadium generously rewarded a couple of good seasons with piles of cash. But with no infrastructure, it became increasingly hard to actually spend the money on anything. And so Joe began to stretch away.

We have established then that this game has a sound structure, tactical depth and that tiny gap for luck that keeps everyone on their toes. But what effect do you have on the game? Can different personalities play it in different ways and have different experiences? In short, can you be an utter bastard and will it actually help?

This is where Superclub soars. There is so much room for malevolence. You can start bidding wars with rivals to force them into overspending. You can deceive your opponent with crafty team selection. If your club rises above your rivals, you can deliberately and maliciously unsettle their key players. After my brief period of success, I turned on Joe like a viper, forcing him to accept an £82 million bid for a five-star midfielder. Had he refused, that player would have gone on strike for the season. Sadly, this too would prove to be a poor decision. Joe is like The North. Joe remembers.

When the tables began to turn, his vengeance was brutal. Now I was Southampton to his Liverpool. The few quality players I had accumulated were duly poached. And it hurt. It hurt in a way that few board games have made me hurt. This wasn’t the dramatic collapse of Monopoly where you land on the wrong hotel and reverse your big stack bully status in an instant. This was a classic Hemingway collapse: How did I lose the game? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

But I know what I did wrong now. I know how to put it right. I know that if we played again, I could do better. I’d balance the scouting and the training, I’d focus more on player acquisition than property development. I can still put this right. Come on, everyone. One more game. I’ve got more wine. I’ve got more Pringles. The night is young, my friends. Please. One more game.

In conclusion…

Joe Devine tried to win the game through a Champions League-style mechanic that pitted his team against a randomly selected global giant. The game went to dice-based penalties. We both got so excited that we were woooooooooaaaaaaahing every dice roll and drum rolling on the table. This is a board game. Board games don’t usually do this to people.