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. [Edit: actually, when I was a kid, they were filming an episode of a TV show at a local stadium, and my family went help fill it up with extras. My sister and I went down and sat on top of the dugout, and were just barely visible on TV!] 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 recognizable, and as such it might make a nicely recognizable 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?" 

As a side note, I would like to refer to a baseball diamond-inspired rondel 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 month 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 2045 perhaps), driven by a main mechanism that should evoke baseball pretty well, a rondel variant that is a baseball diamond! 

Back In Time -- The First Draft

Here's what I had for a first draft (this was written about a month ago):

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!

Fast Forward -- The Latest Version

... I DID get a chance to playtest a proof of concept for this game. We played 1 round, it took about hour I think, and it had some issues. For one thing, choosing which base you want to get to and then rolling dice to see how many outs you get does *not* feel like baseball at all. I had thought that since it was the action selection mechanism, you needed to be able to choose your action, even if some actions took on more risk than others. But ultimately I think that idea was misguided, if for no other reason than it just doesn't feel right.

Side note: In an effort to get AI to create an image I could use for the player board, I described the game (and the baseball diamond rondel), and it came up with an incorrect vision (surprise surprise), but one that might be interesting... it put a rondel pawn on the baseball diamond, as if you would move around the diamond like a rondel rather than like a runner playing baseball. Now that's not at all what I had in mind, if using a baseball diamond, why not have the runners be the rondel pawns? However, it might not be the worst idea in the world -- the baseball diamond could act as both a rondel (in the usual sense), as well as a base path for runners, whose position (and color) could still matter for the actions in the game (like, maybe an action is stronger if there's a runner there, and stronger still if they match color, for example)

But I digress... that's not the way I decided to go. No, my next format was a Yahtzee-style mechanism, where you roll and re-roll dice, trying to maximize bases run while minimizing strikes or outs. This just sounds right to me, and the idea of a press-your-luck rondel is an interesting twist.

Really it's less of a rondel, and more of just a PYL/Yahtzee mechanic, but we'll call it "rondel adjacent"

So a few days later we tried again, with a Yahtzee mechanism and right away it felt better. We played 1 round again, and it still took about an hour I think, which is too long if the game is to last 3 or 4 rounds. I still had each runner doing an action at their base, and there were still some problems with the distribution of bases and strikes on the dice. But the Yahtzee format was promising!

The next thing I plan to try is this... Yahtzee again, but rather than all of your runners doing actions, only the batter will do actions, and they'll do 1 action per base they get to. So the more you press your luck to run bases, the more actions you stand to do, but of course the more strikes/outs you may suffer.

It occurred to me that I wanted players to be sitting on 2 strikes or whatever and still be able to potentially get a home run (4 bases), so I thought 6 dice might be a good number. When I tried a few rolls with dice bearing 1 bad face (OUT) and 1 good face (BASE), it did not seem like I was getting enough outs, but with 2 OUT faces it seems like too many. My latest idea (haven't tried it yet) is to make a sort of "1/2 out" face -- I saw something like this in the Fox Experiment: it's basically a face where if 2 of them come up, you lock one of them as an OUT, but if only 1 does, then it's nothing. In the meantime, I've added Coins and Balls to the die faces, and decided that you gain those immediately upon rolling them, you don't have to lock them in. This way, the more you roll, the more "income" you stand to get, and getting coins and balls won't stop you from rolling outs or bases. If you collect 4 balls, then you turn them in for a WALK token, which you can spend any time to lock an unlocked die as a BASE.

The Rest of the Game

The first draft, described above, didn't seem to have potent or interesting enough actions, or enough options for a player. So I went back to the drawing board and decided to take some inspiration from a game that I know does work. I've said before that all I can do is design Eminent Domain over and over again, so I considered the actions from that game (Survey, Warfare, Colonize, Produce, Trade, and Research), and thought "what if I put 2 of those on each base?" In Eminent Domain, there are multiple strategic paths, from planet flipping, to trading resources, to doing lots of research, and they cross pollinate as well (you need to do some planet flipping no matter what, and at least a little Research can help any strategy, but do you go whole hog into flipping planets? Or do you pivot to trade once you have about 4 resource slots? Do you just get a level 2 tech card that supports your strategy? Or do you pile on the tech for lots of stronger actions and some bigger late game points? Those are interesting decisions, and I figured if I use those actions, then this game could have similar paths to victory. 

Then I tried to translate the meaning of each action to this game. Here's what I am currently looking at, though I'm not sure if it'll work well yet:

1st base:
"Produce": Gain $1 per MVP on your team (AKA gray meeples in your team bag) -- this could be called Income
"Survey": Gain one meeple from the display, or draw one at random from the bag, or cut a player (remove them from your team). Meeples are color coded so they're "good at" one of the actions in the game, giving you a better version of that action -- this could be called Roster

2nd base:
"Warfare": Pay $5 to gain an MVP (gray meeple) -- this could be called Recruit?
"Colonize": Advance a Training track on your player board. When you get to the end, gain an MVP (gray meeple) or an MVP card (giving all your MVPs an ability) -- this could be called Training

3rd base:
"Trade": Pay Money to gain a card that helps you score runs or fans - this could be called Practice maybe?
"Research": Gain a card that gives you some ability, maybe specific to one particular color/action -- this could be called Staffing (hiring coaches and stuff) perhaps

The idea is that you'd manage your roster in order to have meeples that are good at the actions you want to specialize in, then you'd either try to make lots of money and try to turn that into runs and fans, or you'd get synergistic abilities that will allow you to avoid outs and score more runs, etc. For example, you might get some abilities that help you get 4 bases in a turn and mitigate your Outs, load up the bases, then hit a grand slam home run for a big chunk of runs and fans... something like that

So far I've only been doing proof of concept testing on this game, if and when I can get the Yahtzee mechanism working right, I'll start to worry more about the rest of the game.