PIX Football Manager: a manager where you cannot see player ratings, and never play alone

Let us start with the part that will lose half of you, because burying it in the twelfth paragraph would be dishonest: PIX Football Manager has no single-player mode. No offline campaign, no games against the computer. It is an online manager, asynchronous PvP against other players' clubs, and it says so in black and white on its own page.

If you were after something to play on a train with no signal, the answer is no. For everyone else, the idea behind it is genuinely appealing.

Blind signings

The game's premise fits in one sentence: the best way to find a good player is to watch them play.

You do not know a player's real quality before you sign him. The cards on the shortlist show zero stars until somebody has actually gone and looked. You have to station scouts in a country, wait out the travel hours, read their evaluation, and decide.

The detail that made me smile is the scouts' mood. On the scouting network screen, Yoshitaka Takeda has been stationed at Striped Fortress for 23 hours, mood: very unhappy. Manuel Aránguiz is travelling to Courageous Lions, 31 hours, mood: also very unhappy. You are not only managing players.

And once you have spotted the gem, you still have to win him over, then win the auction. Some targets look at the club's identity and facilities, others look only at the money. Your rivals are seeing the same players you are.

Three hundred and fifty clubs, not one of them licensed

The game covers more than 350 clubs across 25 countries, all renamed with the genre's customary nerve: Noble Madrid, Barcelunya, London Hammers (founded 1895, in London, Royal League). The players follow the same logic, and the screenshots let slip names that smell distinctly of 1996 and a television left on too late.

Matches are watched fully simulated, in pixel art, with substitutions and tactical tweaks in real time. The rest is unashamed bookkeeping: contracts, facilities, ticket, food and shirt prices to bring money in on matchdays.

How this could go

The bet is interesting and fragile at once.

Interesting, because blind signings fix the genre's main vice: in most managers you end up buying a spreadsheet. Here you need an opinion.

Fragile, because it all rests on population. An asynchronous online manager needs active opponents for the auctions to mean anything and the weekly leagues to fill. A game like this with twenty players is not the same game. That is the only thing that will decide its fate, and the only thing nobody can judge on launch day.

PIX Football Manager launches today, 5 November, on PC, developed and published by PeytonParrishGames.

We will probably start a club: if you want a league with people who read the same site you do, say so on the InsertCoins Discord.