Nutmeg is a love letter to retro football, teletext, and the humble fax machine

They’re watching me. They have to be. For a game to come out that is so targeted, so laser-focused to suit me, there must be some kind of surveillance involved. A deck-building card game based on football stickers from the ’90s? Forget about it. A game that gives me the chance to lead my beloved Everton to the glory we never had? Double forget about it.

Football (soccer) in the ’80s and ’90s had a different flavor. It was a time when big hair was in, shirts were baggy, and players became things of myth. It wasn’t the Moneyball, tactics bonanza it is now – it was a time when grit, determination, and big character could get you across the line. Talent could take you the entire way. It had a certain romance to it.

Nutmeg is a love letter to that time. An era of Teletext, VHS tapes, and picking up the landline to have a chat. Fax machines were used to send documents, and computers could only display one color (green). If you don’t understand what any of that meant, then I feel very old, and you might struggle a little here.

I’m transported back into a fairly dingy office in the ’80s, and it’s from here that I will take over a football team and attempt to win enough games in a season to catapult up the leagues, eventually being crowned champion. It’s similar to other deck builders in that each round has an opponent, and I play cards from the deck I build to defeat them. Only it isn’t life and death, and a loss doesn’t mean failure; it just means I have to go back to the drawing board.

I’m tasked with collecting a team of players capable of winning matches – this could be by training what I already have, or scouring the transfer market for new talent. The ‘what’ will be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in football manager games, but the ‘how’ is where Nutmeg stands apart.

Building a team in Nutmeg is like filling out a sticker book – or a Pokémon card collection, for those who didn’t scrounge around the playground as kids looking for that Top Scorer version of Duncan Ferguson. Each player has an ability level, which will affect what they can do and how effective they are at doing it during a match.

The matches are played out in stages, with the outcomes of different phases of play shown as percentages. The higher my player’s ability, the greater the chance of bearing down on goal and scoring, for instance. The same goes for defending. I also have a hand of cards that can buff various actions during a match, like increasing the chance of a shot on goal or improving my odds of a successful tackle. It’s a back-and-forth, much like any good match should be.

I felt like I was at the whim of chance for a lot of my early matches, with my low-level team and basic set of cards not really giving me much agency in games. It made me realize that Nutmeg is about sensing opportunity and acting accordingly – if I score a goal, then any status cards I used during that passage of play would be refunded, so I needed to do my best to make something happen, lest I be left with nothing in the tank for the next play.

This sometimes felt like a bit of a coin flip, and while it was frustrating at first, once I had the chance to build up a team of my own, set a training schedule, and bulk out my status cards a bit more, I could take control of games and add a bit of flair to proceedings. As I progressed as a club, I found more depth to what I could do on the pitch.

While the matches got more interesting as I grew more familiar with it, Nutmeg is still a fairly simple deckbuilder. Your one goal never changes, and there aren’t any drastic playstyles to adopt. It’s football, plain and simple. Where Nutmeg absolutely nails it, though, is in the presentation: from a mug of tea ready to drink at all times to the Teletext messages after each game, this game drips with humor and authenticity in equal measure, and is absolutely worth sitting down with.