So, a while back I found some threads on here for dudes who play Strat-O-Matic. I think that's over, but I still found it interesting. I played strat for a few years, but hated the cost and how annoying it was to create your own cards with any accuracy.
I looked into several free options, and for the past few years now have I've been playing History Maker Baseball. It's by Plaay Games, and the guy who makes it is retired, and has just about the best customer service I've ever heard of. He posts on the forums and we talk about the hobby pretty often over email.
Anyways, I've created a card generator that creates the cards for your desired season (he gives you the ratings formulas for like $6) and I've been playing a replay of the 1982 Brewers season. I still play some RBI, but tabletop baseball and rolling dice have become my go-to fix for baseball. It lets me disconnect from the digital world and lets my imagination run wild. Plus I can play with any old-school team (or new school - I just played a Brewers/Cardinals game last night with ratings for the 2014 season up to this point). 1987 RBI teams, anyone?
Do any of you guys play any of these types of games? I'm pretty much a nerd for this hobby.
http://www.plaay.com/baseball.html
I played a lot of Statis Pro Baseball as a kid. If someone could come up with a good and free/cheap online version of that, I would be a very happy guy. I know this exists (http://statisprobaseballonline.com/downloads.html) but I haven't been in love with it based on the demo I played. I just want to go online, plug in some teams and go.
I've used this before, and it's free:
http://www.pennantchase.com/
The only problem is I like rolling dice, and watching the game happen on my tabletop, holding the cards, etc so I prefer the Cards and Dice version to the PC. The whole reason I got into it was so that I had a hobby where I was disconnected from the Internet and whatnot when I played it.
Never played Strat-O-Matic. We had a tabletop baseball game when I was a kid - I'm pretty sure it was All-Star Baseball (http://baseballgames.dreamhosters.com/CadacoASB.htm), and we had the 1989 version (on that website, it's the one with the red box, where they added player pictures to the spinners). I loved it, but I rarely could find anyone to play it with, so I didn't actually get to play many games of it.
That game used a spinner, with player cards that had different-sized sections for the different things that could happen to the player, based on his stats. Pitchers were irrelevant, but they included a bunch of them for realism's sake, I guess. It was a bunch of modern (at the time) All-Stars plus Babe Ruth for some reason, who had a ridiculous home run segment.
That's an interesting concept for a game. Cool, glad I learned something new!
Strat basically uses a die to decide if the result comes from pitcher or batter and then two dice to determine result. HMB takes a different and very unique approach that focuses less on statistical precision and more on player identity. Instead of numbers on the card, players have qualities, and those qualities determine results.
For instance, if a guy is a slugger, he's probably hits a good amount of doubles, and one of the game results from the game book is "Slugger?" If the batter is a slugger, he might hit a double, if not, he might strike out or pop out to the CF. Is the pitcher fresh? If so, strikeout, otherwise RF single. Is the ballpark large? Pop fly, otherwise HR. It has umpires who have categories as well (lenient, questionable), highlight reel and rare plays, web gem moments (is RF gold? If so, diving stab. Otherwise he can't get to it, single).
The players can hit exactly what they did in real life, or they can vary based any number of factors. There's also a "clubhouse mood" and other gameday crap that can interfere with a players game. Hot streaks, cold streaks.
It's so simple, yet so deep.
Never played Strat but bought something called Sportsclix, it was a failure of a game It came out in like 2004 and then the next year they made it they changed the game completely and made the previous year non compatible. Genius. Basically you roll dice and have little figurines of the players. I have a ton of the second year of the game because it is an easier game and much less complex that the first year it came out.
They handed out SportClix figures at a Twins game one year - I have a Randy Johnson and an Ichiro sitting on the shelf near my bobbleheads and Starting Lineup guys. Looked like it could be cool, but at the time I didn't have any friends around locally who were at all into baseball.
I think it was a spinoff of HeroClix, which they still make - my son has a couple of those that he got at Free Comic Book Day events.
HeroClix is a good game. I'd never heard of SportClix, but it's a cool concept. I have been trying for a long time to find people to play a league using tabletop baseball games...in fact, for a while we had one running over at the HMB forums that involved a modern day fictional set of players the designer puts out ever year. It was a really good time, but like RBI, people started dropping out and it folded. We were all over the country, but we would play by sending the home team manager lineups/play instructions and the home team would roll the 3-game series.
The guy also puts out a fictional set called "the Century League" which has all sorts of fake players from the 40's with names like Henry "Woodchuck" Dixon and Phil "Night Train" Harris...the hobby is great for baseball nuts.
My 1982 replay project has been fun, and I also occasionally roll an in-season series for the Brewers depending on my free time and who they are playing.
In college, there was a gen ed literature requirement. The topic for each section was different, but the online registration system did not ever tell you what the topic was. Basically, you didn't know what the class would be about until you showed up for the first day of class. I dropped the class twice, one time it was a women's lit class, and the other time it was something else I didn't want to do. My senior year, I discovered that if you poked around the ISU website enough, there was actually a webpage that listed all the topics. So I took a class on baseball literature. I read this book about this guy who created his own charts for a dice baseball game, and was really into it. Apparently one of the possible permutations was that a player could die from a pitched ball, and this happened to the star of his imaginary league. Basically this caused the guy to lose his mind. It was probably the worst book I read for that class.
I had to look it up: The Universal Baseball Association
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156192.The_Universal_Baseball_Association_Inc_J_Henry_Waugh_Prop_
In related news, that class caused me to discover that Ring Lardner was a good author.
Quote from: Turd on 08/07/14, 08:37:54 AM
HeroClix is a good game. I'd never heard of SportClix, but it's a cool concept. I have been trying for a long time to find people to play a league using tabletop baseball games...in fact, for a while we had one running over at the HMB forums that involved a modern day fictional set of players the designer puts out ever year. It was a really good time, but like RBI, people started dropping out and it folded. We were all over the country, but we would play by sending the home team manager lineups/play instructions and the home team would roll the 3-game series.
The guy also puts out a fictional set called "the Century League" which has all sorts of fake players from the 40's with names like Henry "Woodchuck" Dixon and Phil "Night Train" Harris...the hobby is great for baseball nuts.
My 1982 replay project has been fun, and I also occasionally roll an in-season series for the Brewers depending on my free time and who they are playing.
Been playing Heroclix from the beginning, it is a good game. Failed concept having a sport try and get nerds to play a sport clix game. That and the fact that they changed the game after the first year and not making it compatible. Hence nobody hearing of Sportsclix.
I used to play the hell out of All Star (discs, spinner), Baseball Strategy then Statis-Pro.
Lopez and I used to get hammered and play MLB Showdown. Kerry Wood K'd 22 guys in a game for me once.
Great game.
I have a friend who is heavy into Statis-Pro. I liked it, but it was too hard to create your own cards and that annoyed me. When HMB released the formulas, I was all in. I've been introducing football/baseball tabletop games to my 6 year old and he loves them.
There are some great football games out there too, but a lot of them are complicated and take too long to play (Second Season is my favorite, though. It's great). I've recently gotten into this game that was a simpler offshoot from Second Season made by one of Second Season's testers. The guy created "GridBall," and some nutjob decided to cause controversy over the system he used to generate the results, so he said "fuck it, I'll remake the game from the ground up." Hence, GridZone was born. GridZone is free and actually a lot of fun if you have 20 minutes to roll some dice and want to play some "arcade" type football on the tabletop.
I've actually got a project going to create the 12 teams of Tecmo for the game because I think it translates really well to GridZone. The game is really made for solo play, but the designer and I have had discussions on 2P head to head play and I think it plays really well. He's included that in the latest release of the free game. Here's a link to a nice blog post explaining it with a link to download the game following it:
Blog post
http://www.oneforfive.com/gridzone-a-new-incarnation-of-a-new-sport/
Download
https://sites.google.com/site/gridballhq/
I wish that the accuracy of a simulation like Strat-o-matic or APBA could be combined with the skill and fun of MLB Showdown strategy cards.