I find it difficult to have nostalgia for much, but teletext football scores feel oddly like a warm hug. NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager is the new football management Rogue-lite based around deckbuilding and the 80s-90s English Football League (EFL) nostalgia developed by Sumo Digital and Sumo Digital Academy. Concentrated around Division 1-4 (Premier League to League 2), you’ll take charge of an English or Welsh team and either take them to/bring them back to the first division, or “win the whole ‘effing thing,” to quote an American.

Doing so, you’ll either keep the team you have and add on, or you’ll assemble a pick ‘n mix of 80s-90s heroes and villains of footballing idols. From Gordon Strachan and Alan Shearer, to Vinnie Jones and– off the top of my head, that’s about my knowledge of legends of the time: One is Scottish, the other a Newcastle legend, and the latter will break your legs. NUTMEG! goes for a very specific time in footballing history where quality was there, but it was still a proper game, and players smoked forty tabs a day. Like real men, not the pansies knocked down by a stiff breeze today.

Sticker books ruled the playgrounds, computers were for accountants, not pornography, and Torquay were still in the football league. There is just something so satisfying about how NUTMEG! plays, is presented, and feels. Every game is played with a deck of cards and the gods of “chance.” You draw cards for every phase of play, and those that get shuffled back into your hand look tattered and torn as the simple commentary brings the stadium atmosphere. It is nostalgia for a time I wasn’t alive, but still reminds me of those dying days of football I’d go to as a kid when terracing was allowed, and the chill of the air was bitter.

As the title alone suggests, NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager is entirely about a UK-centric retrospective on football, particularly English football (or “soccer” if you’re mentally ill). From the BBC’s red button magazine service to the days of Panini Sticker books, feeling fresh. It is the type of game that, if you’re just the right age (i.e., not sperm), you could almost smell every section distinctly – Bovril and Scotch pies in the stands, the damp and urinal cake smell of the toilets, and offices with enough smoke to strangle you.

That’s enough about the nostalgia, though, the true point of NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager is to play it, not lament about days gone by. With that said, you don’t start with the ability to play as Liverpool or the eventual league champions for that opening 1980/81 season; instead, you can select from only a handful of clubs, having to unlock the rest. If I may draw comparisons, I do think sometimes the ability to play as any club in Sports Interactive’s offerings induces a sort of ADHD-like decision paralysis. Forced to play as the likes of Tranmere in Division 4 is easier.

Easier in terms of decision, it is not an easy task to go from the lower half of Division 4 to European football champions in a handful of seasons; that’s where the Rogue-lite element comes in. Each season offers challenges – buffs and debuffs, or straight-up objectives for the season as a whole. Want to go into debt? Take that “former chairmen’s loan” card and be down £50K, or set yourself the objective of getting the fans on side with over 75% sentiment by the end of the season.

Completing those objectives gets you what is termed “Kit,” which allows you to unlock more teams, make it easier to climb up the leagues with “better” teams, and eventually work your way to the top. Unlike the likes of FM26, you aren’t really meant to get too attached to anything; it is a Rogue-lite after all. Though you can build up the number of clubs you can manage, and you can even build up the club you start with initially, you are supposed to move on. Something I find difficult in the other game – I just like my players and money so much.

At the end of every season, you decide whether to renew the contract, unless you were horrendously bad and the board wants to sack you, or you decide which club to move on to with the “kit” you’ve amassed or the clubs unlocked already. Not that seasons are long either. You don’t play the full forty-six games, and you don’t really play more than one a month in theory either. Each month’s games will be shown on the chalkboard – it’s the 80s-90s, of course – with either three or four decisions to be made.

The two major decisions are formation and orders: 5-3-2, the classic Russian 4-4-2, or 4-3-3, with the orders to drop back, hold shape, or push up. So that’s effectively defensive, structurally strong, or very attacking. The other decisions are whether to delegate the match or play it yourself with the card game. Either broadcasting the game with a possible bonus or playing the grudge match with a team you’ve played before, or teams you’re within six points of. You can play “Hardcore Mode” after your first season, but then the season is longer than a Leonard Cohen song or my reviews.

Each broadcasted game is itself only a few minutes long, as you only play the card game portion of a handful of plays. Kick-offs, throw-ins, goal kicks, free kicks, and so on are the most common start of the phase of play. Each action throughout that phase is played as a card, with the next action offering three options with certain percentages, most of which can be influenced by the tactical cards you draw to your hand.

These offer a percentage bonus at the cost of player stamina. Then there are the fun ones! Like the one that adds 60% to the chance of a goal, a 50% rebound, or the staff bonus that lets me draw two cards after half-time. Not only do they offer weird and wonderful things, but before every match, you open a fresh pack of cards (10p a pack) that can be added to your hand or combined to become even more powerful. These are your basic, run-of-the-mill cards that are produced from the team’s training with certain coaches that week.

Combining (“crafted cards”) is where you get your rebound cards and such, which often help more so at either end of the pitch rather than the midfield. Though not every phase of play, or action therein, will allow you to influence the game. As frustrating as that might be. You control the majority of percentages with the ball in your possession, but the opponent gets a similar deal on their attack. As I say, the combined cards and most powerful ones really work at either end of the pitch, so once they’re in on goal, then you can interfere with their phase of play.

It is a fun, interesting, and sometimes frustrating system for playing an actual game of football. Though I must admit, I do love the game clock as just your dad’s basic plastic Casio watch from the 1970s, suggesting you aren’t actually a manager, you’re just a kid with an imagination. That said, as much as Roy Kent might suggest “it’s just a [expletive] game,” I did inadvertently save-scum before a game and rage-quit after kick-off. Ok, I rage-quit (Alt+F4) a couple of times because a decision in a particular game was ridiculous. A bit like the refereeing at that Falkirk game at the weekend.

Playing a home game against Chester, as Tranmere in the 81/82 season, the game would start with a kick-off, long ball, target man, and foul. I don’t mind the foul! What I do find to be taking the copious amounts of urinal cake stench is the 10% chance of a red card… which I got handed five out of six times playing this one phase of play in one game. Indeed, I thought Wasteland was taking the piss with its percentages. 10% for red, 10% for yellow, and 70% “chance” for a direct free kick, instead going 83.3% of the time in favor of a red, might be “a little” annoying.

Yet for every moment chance doesn’t feel like chance, the build, the tension, and the atmosphere surrounding your goals is as exciting as you’re going to get in digital card-based football. As I’ve said countless times, NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager is leaning heavily on that word “nostalgic,” but it doesn’t feel egregious with it. There is enough to enjoy it without the heavy presence of nostalgia, but if it is just right for you, it is delightfully massaging that part of your brain that makes you feel happy.

You don’t need to know the names Steve Hodge, Chris Woods, Paul Gascoigne, Tony Woodcock, Kevin Keegan, or indeed some guy called John Barnes. I think Leicester City also had that kid who went on to do crisp adverts (Lay’s, for the Americans) and get fired from the BBC, but again, you don’t need that knowledge to enjoy what NUTMEG! does. Though I won’t lie, knowing that and a bit of history around the UK or generally the world is a good help here.

Alongside the teletext football scores, you get somewhat satirical retellings of points in history, like that time Bucks Fizz won Eurovision or that Ronald Reagan was sadly once alive and became president. This includes mentions of BBC classics debuting, like Only Fools and Horses or The Young Ones. Equally, you get football highlights like Alan Brazil scoring a hat-trick in a 5-2 game that wouldn’t happen for two years against Southampton, where he scored all five. As simple as NUTMEG! is, this little bit of news and satirical retrospectives make the world feel full.

Almost, to some degree, I am tempted to say NUTMEG! is for a niche upon a niche, but at the same time, the deckbuilding football aspect is a really solid idea. I’m torn between saying it is for the nostalgic or it’s for the Football Manager fans who are displeased with FM26. The management is stripped right down to the basics, for good and sometimes bad, and that’s where I think some might get frustrated.

It is difficult to know the precursor to players being upset, especially after spending 2-3 months out injured, and now affecting the team’s morale. Unlike the player revolts in Morale Manager 24, because you don’t have 16 goalkeepers, one upset player will result in a sort of Joker card taking up space in your hand, meaning you can’t have as many cards during games to influence play. However, teammates aren’t upset or anything when players are bought and sold within weeks, completely negating the upset player aspect.

Equally, when frustrated with a loss and wanting to jump between your corkboard, whiteboard, the TV, the console to save and quit, the magazine with cards to organize the team and buy new players, or the phone, all have that “I must complete the animation before you interact” thing. That’s something very minor, but it doesn’t alleviate being frustrated with one loss and wanting to move on to the next game quickly. Similarly, playing the card game, the turns from opponents feel slower than I’d care for when I can’t influence play.

Despite those really minor problems, which are just me being inpatient. Everything feels almost as close as you’ll get to NUTMEG! feeling tactile, albeit being a digital card game. If you do have that nostalgia for football, the feeling is impeccable, and mechanically, nothing feels flabby or out of place. Ok, maybe the game of Snake on the computer, but I do love a game within a game.

Ultimately, NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager earns every word of its title, brilliantly balancing deckbuilding football with the management of 80s football stars for a fun Rogue-lite experience. Be it fans of the era, fans from the era, or that you just want a football manager game with a difference, NUTMEG! get almost everything right to take you back to the first time you fell in love with football.

A PC review copy of NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager was provided by Secret Mode for this review.

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NUTMEG! A Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Nostalgia so good I can smell the pies.
• A brilliant Rogue-lite deckbuilding gameplay system.
• The semi-satirical news/entertainment headlines.

Cons

• Percentages seemingly worse than Wasteland.