my copy of the blaseball1: wild cards2 starter set arrived the other day! I haven't seen anybody talking about it, really3. But I've played it twice and I think it's really cool and I want to think a little more about the design!
The first draft of this post began with a few paragraphs explaining first baseball, and then blaseball, but, this is the interent, and you can look up those things if you're interested. Without getting too deep into it - this is a card game, the players of the game come to the game each with their own deck with a number of cards (the starter set comes with two teams, the Auric All Stars vs the Canis Underdogs). On the cards, the blaseball players you (I) know and love are here, represented with art, stats (a number between 0 and... 6? in three domains; pitching, batting, and catching), and usually an "ability" of some kind. The two players face off by rolling two six-sided dice and adding the relevant stat- first, roll the dice for the pitch, then the swing - if the swing is good enough (that is, a higher total than the pitch), the outfielder can attempt to catch it (again rolling the dice), resulting in an immediate out on a catch, but risking giving the runners an additional base. Even just here, there are some interesting decisions - the batting player can choose, on a successful hit, if they'd like to try to run or if they'll take a ball - the outfielder gets to choose whether to take the risk of catching or not. Those decisions have already lent themselves to some compelling drama at the table!
But the real game only begins there - players have abilities, and there are "special" cards, like reactions, events, weather, and items, that can get involved too. The abilities are definitely where I start to detect signs of the game's design DNA - there are "triggered" and "activated" abilities, ala MtG; card abilities often use (and sometimes generate) a resource, Vibe, which is utilized in a way that makes me think of Netrunner's approach to resource acquisition and management; you can even dramatically reveal trap reaction cards, reminiscent of some other collectable card game...
You won't catch me saying that MtG is overly simple - but broadly, there's only so much to do, right? You have creatures, which are largely attempting to enact harm on your opponents and their creatures; you might destroy those creatures with spells, or simply deal enough damage to them that they die; you can bounce them from the "play" area back to the hand, or to the deck, or to a special zone "outside" of the game from which it is unlikely they will return (until next time). Perhaps you might even briefly usurp control of one of these creatures! There are other "permanent" cards, but the modes of interaction remain largely the same. You'll spend your cards or other resources to remove whatever you need to from your opponent's side in order to deal "damage" and win. There are alternative ways of winning, too! But what we are doing with the cards stays largely the same. "Cast spells", "attack with creatures", "cast spells that remove your opponent's creatures to keep them from attacking you."
Netrunner adds something interesting to the mix - while fundamentally, the idea is that there are cards "in play" and the two players would like to destroy/remove/deal with the other player's cards, Netrunner cares about the arrangement of these cards! Not necessarily the physical arrangement, but that's the easiest way to represent what's happening - the corp has different "servers", which each need their own slew of cards to protect them and keep hackers out. The runner gets to / must choose how to proceed - is a distant, poorly defended server worth investigating? Could it be a trap? A bluff? A red herring? Is it better to risk a central server with more defense but fewer unknowns? Can I afford to spend time turning those unknowns into knowns, to set up my next turn?
This is a long-winded way of saying that something I love about this iteration of blaseball is the imagination of running the bases! It only shows on one card, in the Underdog's deck, but the potential of interfering or manipulating in some way that runners move around the bases is really interesting to me! "Tempo" plays, like bouncing someone back to hand, are definitely valuable in MtG, but can often be simply annoying - if you don't have the tempo to follow it up, you've merely delayed the inevitable. Here, where bouncing someone from second base back to hand can be back breaking - worse than simply killing a player only to have them replaced, getting someone on base is often a difficult and fraught endeavor, and outs and strikes persist4! I cheered both times it happened, each time on a different end of the experience.
The dice rolls are interesting to me as well. I've played a lot of pbta ttrpgs by now, and so I'm pretty well acquainted with the 2d6 distribution - it doesn't make it any easier when that "1" shows up all too often. One thing that we encountered was that getting a bad matchup can be brutal - at the end of an inning, if you're all out of vibe to spend, and you're just outclassed by the pitcher... you roll the dice three times and watch the strikes kill you. It feels like baseball! The dice keep the hope alive, until they don't - seeing a high pitch number come in, and knowing there's nothing you can do about it is pretty rough.
On the note of die rolls and vibe - in addition to your players & specials, you also have a "team" card, which has abilities on it, presumably representing your team. I say presumably, because in the starter set the two team cards are identical - both let you spend vibe "from" the team card to reroll one or both dice, and let you spend vibe from anywhere to bump up your total, 1-for-1. There are a couple of interesting things happening here - rerolls are obviously powerful, and the limitation on where the vibe has to come from makes for a neat tension. Vibe is added to players when they're revealed - each player "enters" with some amount of vibe (usually 0 or 1, but so far up to 4). Each team card starts with 3 vibe, but you'll quickly use those up. More can be generated by discarding cards when it's time to cycle players (notably, this gives an advantage to the outfield team, since they can shuffle their deck as often as they want, whereas the batting team has to switch sides when they have no players left to play in their hand). You get 1 vibe for discarding one or more cards during that phase; OR you get 1 vibe if a player with vibe still on them is discarded from play. All in all, I thought this was pretty elegant, and it's pretty fun having to decide whether to gamble on rerolls or commit to a big spending push, or to wait and see if you can take advantage of a bad pitch.
Player card abilities run the gamut - there's already a wealth of ideas in the base set (& booster packs). As mentioned above, the abilities definitely seem inspired by the kind of things you'd see in MtG, and in fact, in play, I've had to fall back on the "well, if this were magic..." approach to attempt to adjudicate some potentially complex interactions. It's unclear, for example, if blaseball uses "the stack" on the rare occasions when it has to. I'm by no means an MtG judge, but here's a slightly thorny interaction; if my flipping of a card triggers an ability that depends on my player's location, and my opponent flips a reaction, incinerating my player, does my triggered ability count? (In magic, a card that "dies" "remembers" its qualities just before death - triggering an ability that depends on certain qualities, and then killing the creature won't fizzle the original ability, if indeed I met the prerequisites. If Chorby Short is incinerated, do they satisfy the condition of being at bat? When the ability resolves, Chorby is definitely NOT at bat, and in fact has been replaced by another player - does the ability resolve? we ruled "yes" in the moment). So far, I've only had one terminology problem - after a batter gets on base or strikes out, each player not on base has to spend vibe if you'd like to keep them. Same for each "special" card, but there's a special kind of special card, weather, that doesn't live in the special zone, and very rarely interacts with vibe - do weather cards have to be "paid for" at the end of a turn? The rules seem pretty clear that "all other rules that apply to Special cards apply to Weather cards", so my guess is yes, but it doesn't quite match up with the usual vibe "economy" (since Weather cards don't come with their own), and it also feels a little strange to have weather be so mercurial (especially in blaseball, where weather typically lasted the entire game).
Well this is already much more than I'd intended to write! We haven't even touched some of the other pieces of card design, such as a player's "energy" or the possibility of "alternate" players. I'll sum up by saying that I think it's a really interesting game, and I'm hoping to play more! I'm definitely curious if more official cards are on their way, but I'll probably try to whip up some custom cards in the near future. The observation that I had wanted to make is that I think the Underdogs have the slightly worse deck (my reading is that it sacrifices consistency / individually powerful cards for the possibility of "combos" that are... difficult to make work due to how fast moving the game is and how disadvantageous it is to keep cards in your hand for very long - but that's a discussion for another time I guess). Which I suppose is fitting (quote my opponent, upon losing, "well, they don't call them the Overdogs"), but slightly disappointing. I've made my first edits to the deck, and I'll report back with future observations! Hopefully less wordy next time.
1: blaseball (RIV) was an internet phenomenon, involving something like simulated baseball.
2: created by Wayfinder Games, Wild Cards is a (trading?) card game, whose future is, as I understand it, up in the air - blaseball, the phenomenon itself, having been killed. Wild Cards was also a "decree" enacted by community vote in an early season of blaseball.
3: I won't pretend that I looked very hard, but as of the time of this writing, I didn't see any comments on Wayfinder Games' twitter, and only one comment in the gamefound campaign that mentioned actually playing it.
4: I got to the end before realizing I'd skipped over an extremely funny but I think brilliant game design decision, which is that balls and strikes persist between batters - meaning you can have a batter rack up three balls and then hit a solid single, setting up your next batter with an easy walk. By the same token, you don't just erase strikes by getting in a lucky hit, and you can be placed in a really tricky position for your next at-bat! Making balls, strikes, and outs pieces of play, instead of just standing in for what's happened so far, is another game design angle that I think is so cool, and opens up some interesting ground. There are batters who can add strikes to get buffs, or who can remove strikes at the cost of vibes, or pitchers who add strikes two at a time! Great stuff.
