Finally, a football card game that doesn’t cost your soul

I’ve never played a football card game like this before. I don’t think I’ve ever played a card game like this. And how refreshing it is that a football card game can be released and not be mired in a penalty box quagmire of grubby microtransactions, mentioning no names. There’s no veiled gambling here, nor is there any of the grasping corporate greed of football today. There are only the scuffed pages of a 1980s Panini football sticker book, flapping in the breeze of simpler times.

Nutmeg

Developer: Sumo
Publisher: Secret Mode
Platform: Played on PC
Availability: Releases 26th March on PC (Steam)

Nutmeg is a card game, so you don’t play matches in real-time as you would in a football game like International Superstar Soccer (I’m only using vintage references today). It’s also a football management game, and this part you will absolutely recognise, which lets you buy and sell players, train them, upgrade your stadium, determine what merchandise you sell, and wrestle with the board. But we’re not talking modern football here. We’re talking football of the 1980s (when all the best things came into being, cough cough), when football was muddier and players seemed close enough we could smell the kits on them.

The retro vibes here are immaculate. Your management headquarters are a boxy office that looks like a museum displaying the technological artefacts of yesteryear. Behold, the football manager’s office of the 1980s! There’s a fax machine for sending prospective contracts to players, there’s a square television set running Ceefax, pulling in news stories and fixture results, and there’s a computer that can only produce two colours on a screen. There’s a metal filing cabinet so heavy it could crush a cow, there’s a landline (my lord!) with a turning dial, and there’s an FM radio, a browning intercom, a blackboard flip board… It is a room where technology went to die. But here it’s in full life, and everything is touchable and everything has a physical presence. Everything also serves a purpose. Click something and it does something. This is your tactile retro museum command centre.

But forget the ancillary stuff for a moment and let’s talk about the game of cards, because this game of cards is unusual. The first unusual thing: you don’t manually play every football match. You can’t manually play every football match, in fact. You can only play one in five – there or there abouts. You can ‘broadcast’ – that’s what the game calls manual control – a match once every month, meaning you’ll have to tactically choose which one to play. The other matches, the computer automatically settles, by comparing the teams’ relative total card-point strengths and doing some invisible maths. You can improve your score by training your team and buying new players, as you might expect. The second unusual thing: when you play cards, you don’t play player-cards themselves.

When a match is underway, you’ll see a sequence of events represented by cards in the middle of the screen. This sequence of events progresses from defence through attack, and every time the sequence progresses, each team has a chance to affect the outcome of an event. If I have the ball and I’m pressing an attack, the opposing team has a chance to defend, just as I have a chance for my move to succeed. It’s these percentage chances that buffs affect. So say you’re in front of goal but only have a 30 percent chance to score: no problem. Whack down a 30 percent buff and ripple that net.

It’s an unusual system but it works well. There’s an orchestral burst of music each time the sequence of events builds which rises in pitch to reflect your building excitement as you press towards goal. And though the cards are static, the art is evocative and the energy of the game is such that it combines to feel like a football match is being played. Also, altering the outcome of a pivotal moment feels like a god-making act of fateful intervention. Speaking of god-like interventions: there is actually a Hand of God card, inspired by Maradona, which greatly increases your chance to score but might also get you a yellow card. So you see, there’s charisma here, wit, charm. I love the yelp of pain elicited by an ankle-breaking defensive manoeuvre I employ, maybe because it reminds me of how I used to play in real-life. Not so friendly now, am I?

Buffing a percentage chance is an easy concept to understand. What’s less easy to understand is how to affect the hand of cards you have to play. Clearly, lots of cards means having lots of tactical flexibility and a greater ability to affect the outcome of a game. Yes, there’s a stamina cost associated with playing many of the cards, but you can sub players to mitigate this, though in those days you only had one sub, so be warned. But while in control of fourth division York (you have to start in the fourth division), I routinely found myself with only a few cards I could actually play, and therefore I was largely powerless to affect what was going on, which was frustrating.

Now, this is partly a skill issue, I’m sure. I know that things like team training affect which cards I get to use because before each game, you get a card pack to open related to the training regime you’re using. A defence regime offers more defence cards for example. Team tactics also affect which cards you’ll pull, as does formation. Go more attacking and you’ll pull more attack cards. I also believe some individual players unlock their own buff cards, though I’m still trying to wrap my head around a lot of this. Which is to say: I know there are things I can do to improve my options, but even so, I don’t feel like I have clear visibility over a deck I can tinker with and build, but rather I have temporary decks I am at the mercy of. And I don’t like that feeling.

Then again, is Nutmeg really a card game? I know it revolves around cards, but when you don’t have cards you can use in a situation in a match, or when the computer is settling games for you, the computer determines everything for you, just as it would in a regular football management game. And even when you are playing cards, I’m not sure it feels like a particularly deep card game anyway. I don’t think you can play more than one card each turn and besides some card draw, I haven’t seen many combo-minded key words.

I am fairly new to this so I might be missing things, and also, I do appreciate what Nutmeg is doing and the breeziness it’s going for. This is more of a fantasised glimpse at football management than a studied simulation of it, and by insisting you play only one match in five, the game alleviates the slog of playing a full league by greatly speeding your progress. This means you’ll earn money more quickly and that players will improve through training more quickly, which effectively means you’ll more often be able to do the big things that are more fun in games like these: buy and sell, upgrade your stadium – make big moves. And I’m down for that.

Playing Nutmeg is like finding that Panini football sticker book in a dusty old box somewhere and flicking through and looking at all the horrendously short-shorted players you used to idolise. It’s a call back to a different era of football and a different era of games, albeit mixed with a dose of new. It’s intriguing, it’s charming. Whether it has enough strategic substance to it to sustain it in the long-term, I don’t know, but I’m happy enough playing it for now not to mind.