While the Christmas “holiday” hands me a potentially crippling Premier League schedule to juggle around family affairs and Two Ronnies repeats, I’m guessing that you lot will have some tinkering time on your hands. A perfect period to perhaps consider a new Fantasy Football distraction and, on that front, I might just have a little something for you.

We’re always happy to pimp new Fantasy games, although, as a rule, we narrow our search to games that at least offer something different to the ”industry standard” Fantasy Premier League (FPL) ruleset. Player Manager appears to fit the bill nicely.

This new game adopts a similar player auction mechanic employed by the sadly missed Times “Play The Game” effort from previous seasons. This, rather ingeniously, gives you a quick and easy way of entering multiple teams from one list of players, with the chance to win cash across multiple leagues on a weekly basis…

The Player Station is at the core of Player Manager. This is where you rank and assign bids to the players that you have targeted for your team. At the Gameweek deadline (the familiar 11.30 on a Saturday morning), players are allocated to teams according to the rankings and bids that you place here. Select the players you fancy, tweak them in order of ranking and add maximum bids per player within a budget of £100 million, you’re then all set for the Gameweek deadline and the auto auction.

Managers are placed in leagues of 5, 10 or 15 (with varying prize pots) and, at the deadline, the game picks a manager in the league at random and then puts his top ranked player up for auction. Bids for that player are compared throughout the league and highest drafts in the player. The process continues, with players allocated in the order in which they are ranked in a manager’s player list. The auction ends when all teams in the league have 11 players allocated.

You can have as many or as few players in your list as you want but, once that is exhausted, the game auto selects the rest of your starting XI based on a set criteria. You can choose for the game to auto-select by factors such as form and price.

It sounds complex – but once the basic concept is grasped you can begin to see the potential. A single player list can be used to generate as many teams as you like across as many leagues as you wish to enter, all with very little effort. Each team you enter costs a quid, so, for a tenner, you can enter 10 teams in 10 different leagues, giving you 10 opportunities to win cash if you rank high enough. All those 10 teams are generated from your one single list of ranks and bids. Clever, clever stuff.

There are some subtle strategies to be unearthed around the Player Station – like the tactic of ranking players highly that you feel perhaps won’t fare well in the coming Gameweek. These will force them into auction early and, if you have a hunch that your rivals may have foolishly placed a high bid value on them, you will be pushing a duff player into their lineup, perhaps even for an inflated price. It’s a risky tactic but a unique and satisfying new concept in the Fantasy Football experience.

Indeed, a return to the idea of “one player, one team” that you get from an auction situation is more than a little refreshing. It harks back to the early 90’s golden era of office leagues, organised from Fantasy League stats in newspapers. I love the idea of being the only manager in my league who owns Wayne Rooney or Fernando Torres – it offers a heightened feeling of investment and it ramps up the levels of anticipation that is so crucial to the appeal of Fantasy Football. It’s a tough mechanic to integrate into a quick, simple online game – Player Manager may well have just pulled it off here though.

Each Gameweek you can tinker with your player list as little or as much as you like, change rankings and add new bids – so each Gameweek your team is scrapped and replaced by a new auction process in each league you enter.

You can enter any number of leagues in the Solo Game against a random collection of your Fantasy Football peers, with each league entry costing 10 credits (for £1). Alternatively you can invite friends and set up a league together. Here you can choose the duration of the league in Gameweeks, the number of credits required for entry and the size of the prize pot. Friends and Groups can be maintained as a nod to the Social Network sites and Player Manager even offers a referral scheme to offer an incentive for getting friends involved; another nice touch.

The Friends league scenario also unlocks a new level of play as, over the weeks, you become aware of favourite players and regular auction targets that make up your friends teams; that adds a new layer of strategy to the auction process with back-biting and diplomacy coming into play.

Once you’ve explored the fundamentals of leagues and the auction, it’s a relief to discover that the scoring system here is reassuringly simple. Defenders score 50 points for a goal, Midfielders 30 and Strikers 20 points. Assists return 15 points, with Clean Sheets rewarding Keepers and Defenders with 20 points. There’s no Bonus Points on offer and the game and the creators have also ensured that the rules of Assists are far from fuzzy (no rewards for rebounds, free-kicks, penalties or own goals). My initial thoughts are that, with cleanies returning just 20 points, there could be an imbalance with the value of Defenders who will be reliant on attacking points to pull their weight – more on that once I get hands-on with the game next week.

We’ve seen lofty claims of “Revolutionising” Fantasy Football sprayed about many times before from other games – Player Manager are being altogether more humble and are looking instead to sit alongside the established season-long games. Their efforts do scream of potential however. “Next-Gen”? the jury is out but Player Manager could well come closer than most at nudging its way into our affections as a supplement to a relentless FPL habit. I’ve put my Player list together and I’ll be generating some teams for this coming Gameweek, to follow this preview with a “hands-on” account after the weekend.

If you fancy joining me you also have the chance of winning some big cash. Player Manager is running a separate Season Prize Pool for the highest total score (gathered from your best 20 Gameweeks) in the game with a current pot of over £5100. That costs an additional £5 to enter and will run until the end of the season, but with 20 Gameweek scores to gather, you have just a couple of weeks to enter before this closes.
Click here to give Player Manager a go and look out for me in the Solo Leagues. I’m already preparing a £20 million bid for Matt Taylor.