The Baseball Card Game 2006

An impressive, minimalist approach to playing “dice baseball” (although this game uses a card-draw from a standard playing-card deck for its random-results generation). Designer Jeff Downey has managed to incorporate just about every nuance of table-top baseball into a few pages of very clear rules and only two charts. If you like to rush, this is potentially the quickest playing baseball game available.

Very general player-attributes are “graded” for overall skill (Batter, Eye, Power, Defense/Fielding, Speed) i.e. a batter’s Power rating could be “Star”, “Good”, “Average”, or “Poor”. Likewise, a pitcher would be rated similarly for Control etc.

For each at-bat, a card is drawn. It is first checked against the pitcher-rating chart, and depending on the result, following cards may need to be drawn, i.e. the pitcher-result may indicate “Batter”. In this case, the batter has put the ball into play and so the batter chart is used when drawing the next card (using the batter’s particular rating, of course.) The result might be a hit or possibly “Eye”, so then the batter’s ability to wait for a good pitch is being called into question. We go to “Eye” chart and draw another card for the result etc.

Steal, bunt, hit and run, double plays, sac flys, errors, and fielding are all represented in this fascinating, fast and very successful “micro-game”.

It is easiest to use a fictional team and randomly generate the attribute-grades, but you can certainly use real stats and create a general guide for using historical players.

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