Peanuts and Crackerjacks

 

"Take me out to the ball game,

Take me out with the crowd.

Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,

I don't care if I never get back,

Let me root, root, root for the home team,

If they don't win it's a shame.

For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,

At the old ball game."

Let me begin by saying that I am NOT a baseball fan. I think it's a boring game to watch and even more boring sport to play. I really have no investment in it, no nostalgia... I didn't grow up with my old man dragging me to home games, of choking down stadium hot dogs, or anything like that. But I recognize that, like it or not, as America's Pastime many people know baseball -- it's kind of ubiquitous in American culture. Phrases like "Three strikes and you're out," "bottom of the 9th," and "swing and a miss!" are used all the time, in many contexts. There's no question that Baseball is recognizeable, and as such it might make a nicely recognizeable theme for a game.

I recently noticed that a baseball diamond (with runners rounding the bases) looks an awful lot like one of my favorite boardgame mechanisms: a rondel. So of course, I started thinking about how a baseball inspired rondel could drive a game.... I came up with some ideas, but of course they all involved having various actions that you'd perform as you get runners on base, and the obvious question became "what a these actions? What is it you're trying to do?" 

Using a baseball diamond rondel -- which, as a side note, I would like to refer to as a "Home Rundel."  I'd also like to say I thought of that myself, but alas I did not, someone on the Internet said it. But I digress... 

Using a Home Rundel for action selection to play a game of baseball doesn't make a lot of sense, so it would have to be something else. It could be some Civ-style game, or something similarly generic, but that's so distinct from the baseball inspired mechanism, it didn't make sense to me either. What I landed on I think makes a lot of sense: managing a baseball team. 

So  that's what I've been thinking about for the last week or so... A game about managing a baseball team over the course of a season (like Envelopes of Cash, Blood Bowl Team Manager, or Baseball Highlights 2035), driven by a main mechanism that should evoke baseball pretty well, a rondel variant that is a baseball diamond! 

Here's what I've got so far:

First off, your "Home Rundel" has actions at the 4 bases:

1st base: player management (hire runners, cut runners, etc)

2nd base: income management (get money, fans, and money/fan income)

3rd base: personnel management (hire coaches, All-stars, etc)

Home: score runs

In addition to your personal rondel/baseball diamond, you have a bag of meeples in various colors representing the players on your team. Each turn you draw one and add it to your rondel at home plate. Then you decide whether you want to go for a single, double, triple, or home run (move 1, 2, 3, or 4 spaces on the rondel), where the farther you move, the more strikes/outs you risk incurring. Finally, you move all your runners 1/2/3/4 spaces (whatever you chose), and then resolve the actions at bases where you have runners. Actions are color coded, and if the runner matches the action's color, you get a stronger version of it. You also get the stronger version of the action for the player who's "at bat" this turn, whether it matches color or not, which I hope might encourage the riskier plays. 

You take turns until you collect 9 strikes (3 outs), then your round is over, and you record your runs for the round. I'm debating the idea that in a multiplayer game, the first player to get 3 outs triggers round end, and everyone else gets 1 last turn to bring their runners home - that might put a time pressure on players similar to Pirates of Maricaibo (I've been playing that a bit lately). I think each round you'll play in a different city, and record your runs in that city. There could be a bonus of some kind for the player with the most runs in each city. 

I think it'd be cool if the winner of the game is simply the player who gets the most runs in the final round (I've seen a similar dynamic in Colosseum for example). Prior rounds would be about building up an engine, or winning bonuses towards that final round.

I have assembled a digital prototype on TTS, and hope to try a proof of concept of this game tonight!