Nutmeg! [REVIEW] – A Wonderful Blast from Football’s Past 

I love Football Manager – heck, I think I’ve spent over 200 hours with this year’s release alone… but that can be a problem, can’t it? When you’re tired after a long day at work, the thought of sifting through endless spreadsheets, youth academy reports, and complex tactical menus can be exhausting, and that’s where Nutmeg comes in. Instead of chasing hyper-realistic simulations, it mashes up old-school club management with deck-building card mechanics, offering a nostalgic, old-school, and fun experience aimed squarely at older players who remember the sport before the internet took over. 

Check out some screenshots down below:  

The very first thing that strikes you about Nutmeg is the wonderfully unique visual design. You never actually see a traditional match engine or even the faces of your squad, with everything happening from the perspective of a football manager sitting in a delightfully cluttered, retro office space. Your entire career, which spans the two decades starting in the 1980s, is handled through brilliantly outdated physical items, and honestly? It’s a visual treat that never gets old. 

Want to check the latest league table or catch up on football news? You have to turn on a chunky television set and read the pixelated, teletext-style screens. Need to balance the club’s finances? You will be doing it on an old-fashioned computer monitor that’s sitting on your desk. Making a transfer offer means interacting with a fax machine, while your actual squad is represented by a physical sticker album (note to self: get a football sticker album from Tesco later tonight). You even plan your matchday tactics on a dusty chalkboard, and if that doesn’t scream nostalgia, I don’t know what will. 

When you start the main career mode, you are given the reins of a struggling club in the Fourth Division – you can’t start with your favourites here, with the journey to the top a long one. It’s your job to build this team up from no-hopers to title contenders, with players handling everything from expanding the stadium and pushing merchandise to setting up your team or hiring backroom staff. Finding the right employees is a constant balancing act of weighing their wage demands against their actual skills, forcing you to make tough compromises just to unlock basic features like scouting new talent… it might sound stressful, but it’s genuinely engaging. 

“Nutmeg offers its own wonderful (and very nostalgic) take on football management by successfully mixing up old-school stat surveying with the fast-paced thrill of a card-battler, and it just works.” 

As you complete seasons, you earn a meta-currency called kit. This lets you unlock different starting clubs, giving you the choice to stick around and build an Alex Ferguson-like legacy with your current lower-league team, or jump ship to a massive club once you have proven your managerial worth. However, running the club from your desk isn’t without its frustrations, and the game throws a massive amount of information at you right from the start. The tutorial takes you through a lot of different mechanics that are a little tricky to understand to begin with, and because the game is so heavily committed to the physical office aesthetic, navigating between your duties can feel a little cumbersome at first (especially when compared to modern football management sims). There’s a lot to take in, and whilst it does get easier the longer you play, that first hour of play might leave you lost on the regular. 

Thankfully, where the game truly shines is on matchday. A full season is fifty games long, but you do not play all of them manually: each month features five fixtures, and you let the computer simulate a selection of these based on your squad depth, training routines, and tactics, giving you clear percentage odds of a win, draw, or loss. However, you’ll also have designated broadcast matches, and this is where you take direct control. 

This is where the card-battling system comes into play. Matches are broken down into possessions that move from one side of the pitch to the other, and every action, whether it is a crucial tackle, a daring long pass, or a shot on goal, relies on a base success percentage. To tip the scales in your favour, you play cards from your deck which you collect through small training challenges – they can also be combined into more powerful variations, offering greater buffs that can tip individual showdowns mid-match in your favour. 

Check out some screenshots down below:  

It creates a brilliant sense of risk and reward: if you play a bunch of cards to guarantee a goal and the shot goes in, you get those cards back to use again later in the match, but if the shot misses, you lose them completely. It forces you to think carefully about your strategy… do you go all out in the first half to secure an early lead, or do you save your best defensive cards to protect a narrow margin in the final minutes? These matches are incredibly fast-paced, usually wrapping up in just a few minutes, but they’re an absolute gamechanger that add an exciting additional layer of strategy to the already satisfying Nutmeg experience. 

Honestly, the core loop is incredibly addictive, and because you can power through an entire season in about an hour and a half, it is incredibly easy to pick up for a short session… and then suddenly realise you have played through half a decade (it happened to me). It feels like a blend of two completely different genres, but it just feels natural, intuitive, and a ton of fun, with plenty of different mechanics at play to keep players invested for hours on end. 

Developer: Sumo Digital 
Publisher: Secret Mode 
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed) 
Website: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3590560/NUTMEG_A_Nostalgic_Deckbuilding_Football_Manager/