Hits & Outs (ヒット＆アウト) is inspired by the strategic battle of wits between the pitcher and the batter. Reproducing baseball’s thrilling moments without having to keep track of player statistics or the results of every pitch. As the name suggests, there are no balls or strikes in this game, only hits and outs!
 November 2025 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.  Skyjo – 5/10 Skyjo is a very light card game, roughly the weight of other card games you might find at big box retailers. It is a variant of the traditional card game Golf, so you might notice some similarities to other “improve your hand then go out” games like Cabo. Each player will be dealt 12 cards facedown in a 3×4 grid. Choose two to turn faceup, but the rest remain a mystery from all players. On your turn, you will exchange a card from the pile with one of the cards in your grid. You are trying to end up with the lowest total score in your grid, so getting rid of high cards is the most obvious option. The new card is placed faceup, and will either come from the top of the discard pile or a random draw from the deck, your choice. The replaced card becomes the new top card of the discard pile. Naturally, you will occasionally accidentally replace a better card with a worse one, which not only makes your score worse, but leaves a good card on top of the discard pile for the next player to take. There is also a minor element of shooting-the-moon here, as a column with all three of the same card is discarded entirely. Perhaps with two of the same bad card in a column, you should try to find a third? However, this is rarely a good strategy, as it only takes two turns to replace the bad cards. What are the odds you’ll find a matching card quicker than that? Skyjo is a family-reunion-type card game. Good for all ages to play together while eating and chatting, not at all taxing mentally. I’m going to prefer and suggest a different option, but it’s not as painful an experience as some others in this genre.  The Grand Carnival – 6/10 In The Grand Carnival, players will compete to build the best fairground, both in its layout and the attractions it offers. Think Roller Coaster Tycoon without any coasters. You’ll first need to purchase foundation tiles. These consist a combination of grass spaces and construction spaces. You can only build attractions onto construction spaces and you’ll get endgame penalties for any construction spaces that haven’t been covered. But the grass spaces are an important consideration as well, providing the walkways for your customers. Without a carefully planned walking path, your point scoring opportunities will be quite limited. The foundation tiles appear in a queue, ranked from 1 to 5. Un-purchased tiles will move down in price, and eventually be removed altogether. In each round, you get to take a 5-power-action, a 4-power-action, etc. So is it worth spending your 5-power-action to take the perfect foundation? Or will you need it instead to build a building. The buildings themselves are generally worth more points the larger they are, but larger buildings also require higher power actions. With your building underway, the customers can start walking through, even if everything isn’t finished yet. The number of spaces they can move is also determined by what power of action you spend on this movement. Most of the tactics happen in deciding what power level to use for each action, while the strategy is more about planning the park overall. So far, this might all seem pretty straightforward, or even fun and challenging. And that’s all true. But the scoring system is by far the weak point of the game. At every turn players seem artificially thwarted (or at least capped) in trying to generate lots of points. So constrained and unintuitive are the scoring methods that it seems to funnel all players towards the same non-specialized approach. It’s the very antithesis of “multiple paths to victory”. Multiple players in our game ended up with wasted actions at the end of the game because there was no feasible way for them to generate any more points in the categories they had been working on. I think there is some fun to be had here in spite of this complaint. And it’s possible that if you know going in that you need to plan for the unintuitive scoring, the experience would improve. I enjoy the theme and the gameplay here, but it really feels like the scoring was a kludgy concession to degenerate strategies identified during playtesting. There was surely a better way to address those problems.  Carson City – 6/10 Carson City is a worker placement game that came out in 2009. For those that have been in the hobby since that time, that first sentence might tell you everything you need to know. It shows a strong influence from Caylus, has a lousy rulebook and player aids, and doesn’t reflect modern design sensibilities when it comes to tolerance for randomness and aggression. Over four rounds, players will place their cowboy workers onto various action spaces, which are then resolved in a pre-determined sequence. Rather than merely being a first-come first-served situation, players can place onto spaces already occupied by their opponents. In these cases, a duel will occur, with the winner getting to take the action and the loser having all their plans ruined -er, I mean, getting to place an extra worker in the following round. Spaces do not provide options to get extra workers or build an engine around actions. Rather, the action spaces are concerned with generating money, turning that money into points, and boosting your firepower to win duels. How much money you can convert and at what rate you can do it are primary strategic considerations. While there are spaces that simply grant money and guns, the big bucks and heavy firepower will come from building buildings onto the shared board. This requires first claiming a plot of land, then purchasing a building to put onto it. These often provide ongoing income without the need of any future workers being placed there. However, they too can be dueled over, with a successful opponent stealing half of the building’s income for the round. Certainly there are many decisions to make, and they are meaningful. Will you gain more money by robbing a building or making your own? Where should you claim a plot of land, given how all the buildings interact with their surroundings? How much should you prioritize your firepower, especially considering the strong random element involved? Carson City was a mixed bag for me. It mostly feels like its time has come and gone. The claiming of plots and building on top of them is executed much better in Kutna Hora. And the need to constantly be aware of the arms race in dueling reminds me of my least favorite part of Through the Ages. Nevertheless, I can see how this would be a favorite game for some people. If you think Caylus is one of the best worker placement games (it’s not) but it just needed more confrontation (it doesn’t), you might find Carson City right in your wheelhouse.  Rumble Nation – 7/10 That’s a weird, overly-literal translation of the Japanese title, if you were curious. “The World Resounds” or some such thing would probably get closer to the meaning. But you’re not here for the linguistics. (If you are though, let’s talk privately; I love that stuff.) Rumble Nation is a 30-minute dice-rolling area control game. The area control aspects are rather rote, but the dice rolling has an innovative slant to it. In order to place units from your supply onto the board, you will roll three standard dice. One of the dice indicates how many units you place (half the value rounded up, like a d3) and the other two dice are added together to indicate the location where those troops are placed. This decision about which two dice to pair is reminiscent of Can’t Stop. Due to how probabilities work, the 2 and 12 are obviously much rarer locations to get to place troops at all, with the 7 being the most common. Strangely enough, these values are also the points granted for controlling the area, making the 2 spot both difficult to control and worth very little, while the 12 spot is equally difficult to control but worth the most. The locations are not scored until all the troops of all players have been placed. The player who finishes placing sooner will win ties against later players, but this is generally not enough incentive to want to finish too quickly. Finishing later allows you to see where other people’s troops are and to know exactly how many you need to add to win the spot, as well as to be opportunistic about locations that may have no troops placed at all yet. The final twist are the tactics cards. Once per game, instead of rolling dice for your turn, you may select one tactics card to perform. These are generally things like relocating already-placed troops in various ways. The available tactics cards are a subset of dozen possible options, adding some variety to the strategic considerations they offer. Area control games tend to have and odd dynamic I don’t particularly enjoy where getting into an arms race with another player can spell doom for both of you, but never competing for spaces at all is also a poor approach. That dynamic is definitely present here. But if this doesn’t bother people who love El Grande and the like, it probably won’t bother them here either. Rumble Nation succeeds at its goal of being a fast-playing area control game with light but interesting choices generated by the dice mechanic and tactics cards.  Spectral – 7/10 Spectral is a deduction game with a haunted house theme. It plays in about 30 minutes and includes a healthy dose of luck along with the more solvable aspects. This makes it reasonably accessible, but it does demand some personal bookkeeping that less experienced gamers may find arduous. Each player receives a booklet with a layout that matches the 4×4 grid of tiles laid out on the table. This should be kept secret from the other players and notated in whatever manner seems best to you, though there are some suggested methods. The primary purpose of this tracking is to remember the locations of gemstones (good) and skulls (bad). If it was as simple as looking under a tile and seeing a gem or skull, this would essentially be a children’s game. But it’s not so easy. Instead, each tile points to a different tile (example, “the tile two spaces away from this one diagonally”) and tells you what that one contains (gem or skull). Because these tiles are randomized, it is possible that multiple tiles point to the same location, in which case it may contain multiple gems. But a single skull there nullifies the whole cache. Spectral won’t be for everyone. I expect many new players to find it confusing, even frustrating. But it has enough opportunities for a lucky placement that no one should feel totally out of contention, even if their logic and deduction are a bit faulty.  Petiquette – 7/10 Sometimes when you hear a game described or even read the rules for it, it doesn’t really give you a good sense of how it works or why it’s fun. That’s definitely the case with Petiquette, a game about dogs, cats, and ducks wearing fancy hats. Each round begins by dealing six random cards from the top of the deck. These will depict dogs, cats, and ducks wearing one of three types of hat. Each card will also have a number from 1 to 5. Humans are pattern-seekers, so it’s almost unavoidable that the players will see some. “Hey, all the dogs have top hats! The numbers are in ascending order! Every other card is a duck!” But these are inside thoughts. And in fact, they are they very heart of the game. You see, one of the six cards will instead show a question mark, with only the other five depicting our charming anthropomorphic friends. What configuration that question mark should have is an exercise left to the players. Each player secretly selects the perfect combination of animal, headgear, and number that they think best fits the pattern. So long as at least one other player perfectly matches your configuration, you get a point. This isn’t a game about what is “correct”, but neither is it a game about reading the other players. It’s really about collective pattern recognition and the spark of joy that comes from two players delighting in being on the same wavelength. The rules also provide a co-operative variant, which is equally good. In this version, only one player secretly selects a configuration while all the other players collectively discuss what that player chose. Either way of playing Petiquette will lead to lively discussion; it’s just a matter of if you want those lighthearted arguments to happen between rounds (in competitive mode) or as part of the game itself (in co-operative mode). Petiquette can be learned in seconds and played in minutes, but it will continue to charm you longer than it has any right to. A solid filler choice for groups of nearly any type who have 15 minutes to spare.  The Hobbit: There and Back Again – 8/10 There have been a surprising amount of recent board game releases in the Lord of the Rings universe. I don’t know if this is driven by Rings of Power or if the property has become so culturally entrenched that this is just the new normal or if there’s some other reason. But in any event, I am very much here for it. The Hobbit: There and Back Again thankfully ignores the movie aesthetics to provide a cozy and pleasant roll-and-write experience for up to four players. Like Dungeons, Dice, & Danger, this is a surprisingly low player count for a roll-and-write. Still, it’s more forgivable in this case due to the components involved. Rather than a consumable sheet of paper, each player gets what is essentially a dry-erase board book filled with the various scenarios. And these scenarios have very different rules from one another. Set collection, path drawing, racing the other players and many more mechanics are all present here in various amounts depending on which board you choose to use. It is possible, maybe even recommended, to play several times in a row with the same group, progressing through the scenarios (and thus the story of The Hobbit) as you go. Still, even if you do this, the scenarios won’t be scored as a whole or mechanically tied together (with the exception of the final two which can be played as a duo). There are eight different scenarios in all, each taking about 30 minutes to play, which is honestly a decent amount of value if you just played through all of them once and then got rid of the game. But I think there is good replayability here as well from what I can tell. I haven’t replayed a scenario personally, but others I played with have, and I certainly had my fair share of things I’d approach differently after my first game, usually a good sign. The Hobbit: There and Back Again is not particularly groundbreaking, but it is re-markably (get it?) fun. Especially if you connect with the book it’s based on, you’re likely to get good enjoyment out of rounding up dwarves, riddling with Gollum, and defeating Smaug. This is an approachable game that combines meaningful decisions with evocative theme.  Radlands – 8/10 Radlands is a 2-player card game with a theme of post-apocalyptic battle in a surprisingly neon wasteland. Each player starts the game with three base camps. Lose all your camps and you lose the game. Base camp selection is the first thing that happens. Each player will be dealt six camps randomly, each choosing three to keep. This is from a deck of dozens, ensuring lots of variety from game to game. These camps are what dictate your long-term strategy, so choose wisely and synergistically. Though “long-term” is a bit of a misnomer, as games will generally run less than 30 minutes. With your camps selected, it’s time to play. You get three “water” per turn, the currency of the game. You’ll use it to pay costs to play characters as well as to activate abilities, such as those on your camps. You’ll also draw one card from a large shared deck. It will likely be a character, which is played in front of one of your camps, defending it. You can also play characters in front of that character, for a maximum of three cards per column (character, character, base). Cards in front are the most vulnerable, often protecting the ones behind from taking damage. So you’ll need to weigh the water costs, the cards you play, and the positions into which you play them. Choices are plentiful and meaningful. There are lots of small, self-contained two-player card games that might feel similar. Games like Compile, Hanamikoji, and Air Land and Sea feature players trying to attack and defend cards on the board, attempting to win more than their opponent does. But such games can also feel small in a negative sense, due to the limited amount of cards they contain, with gameplay quickly becoming mundane and predictable. For some, this may actually be a positive. After all, Chess has done just fine for itself without unpredictable variety in its available pieces. But my tastes tend towards the “big deck of cards so it’s never the same game twice”. Usually that kind of experience in a two-player card game requires far more complexity, as with CCGs. Or else it generates a silly amount of randomness, as with Smash Up. Radlands avoids the ditches on either side of the road here, beautifully walking the tightrope of a highly strategic and tactical game that also delivers constant surprises that demand adaptability. I’ve only played Radlands once, but I was very impressed. I can see this one moving to at least a 9 if further plays deliver as much fun as the first one did.  Wonderous Creatures – 9/10 If ever there was a hook to make you want to play a game immediately, a meeple that magnetically attaches to ride atop a wooden dinosaur surely qualifies. Each player will in fact receive three of these dinosaur-esque workers, and proudly slot their captain meeple atop one, giving it a special ability. Yes, this is a worker placement game, but it handles the placement in an innovative manner. Instead of placing your worker on top of a space to take the action, you will place it onto a hex map, taking all adjacent actions. This engenders a surprising flexibility in those actions. The same action space could be used from multiple adjacent spaces, and so blocking other players is a fascinating consideration as well. You will be asked to consider not just which actions to activate, but how. Most of these spaces generate resources. Resources will pay for cards to add to your tableau, but you can draw new cards to hand instead of taking those resources. Cards in your tableau are a primary source of endgame points, though each provides a special ability as well (often a one-time bonus). Cards that provide ongoing or periodic bonuses instead are rarer, but more desirable for their ability to help you build an engine. Other points are generated by a race to various randomized goals. These mostly revolve around playing lots of the same type of card, a challenging prospect given the variety of cards and the resources they require. Mostly, the goals are rewarding you for doing things you want to do anyway. But there is just enough incentive to make slight detours from your card plans to pick up goals along the way. I’ve only played Wondrous Creatures once so far, but it’s the kind of game that checks all the right boxes for me. A mid-weight euro with gorgeous components and giant deck of unique cards demanding tactical adaptability. Fans of Wingspan and Everdell looking for something just a slight step up in complexity will not want to miss this one.  A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times.  Ra – 9/10 Ra is one of the absolute best auction games ever made. Players will bid on various ancient-Egyptian-themed tiles in an attempt to get the highest score. There are a variety of different tiles, and fully half of understanding the rules is just understanding the scoring. Despite this, the rules themselves are extremely simple. Each turn, you essentially have only two choices: add a new tile to the lot of tiles up for bid, or start the auction on said lot. The auction is a once-around affair, with the person who started the auction getting the advantage of the final bid. (Certain tiles, once taken, can give you a third option: taking only a single tile from the lot.) Not all the tiles will help your score. Some are actually bad, and will cause you to discard a type of your good tiles. Of course, if you have none of those good tiles, the bad tile doesn’t hurt you at all, while it may hurt someone else quite a bit. This makes the valuation of the tile lots very different depending on which player is bidding. I love that the bad things that happen don’t just happen to you; you have to decide if you want to bid on them as well. This really avoids any “feel bad” moments. The auction economy itself is completely closed, with just 16 pieces of currency in rank order. Whatever you pay to win an auction doesn’t go to a bank. It instead becomes part of the next lot of tiles up for bid. In other words, there may be times you want to bid on a lot of zero tiles, simply to get that 16-value tile that just won the previous auction. My rating has risen the more I’ve played it. There are multiple paths to victory here, and this rewards players who really dig into the game. I often don’t like games where at the end you have to count everything up and see who won, but the mechanics of the game itself more than make up for this drawback. |
In Pyradice you are part of an ancient civilization whose main goal is to build pyramids. Each player will try to get the best stones from the quarry to create their pyramid and earn the most points at the end of the game. The quarry is made up of 47 dice placed on 3 floors. On their turn, the player takes a dice that has at least 3 free sides and places it at the base of the pyramid or on higher floors if it has 2 dice underneath it. On each floor of the pyramid that the dice are placed, the player gains a bonus that allows them to manipulate the dice that are already in the pyramid (turn 180°, roll again, etc). In this way, they try to have a pyramid with dice that corresponds to the public objectives of each card (having only even-value dice, having only increasing values, etc.). If you succeed, at the end of the game you win the points that could give you victory.
Six games enter. Only one game wins.
I brought six games to Thanksgiving this year to play with my ten-year-old child, my partner, and my seventy-year-old parents. Over the course of a few days, they learned and played each game. At the end of the trip, out of curiosity, I asked them to each rank the games, awarding 5 points to their favorite, 4 points to their second favorite, 3 points to their third favorite, then 2 points, 1 point, and zero points to their least favorite. The results were decisive. The winner is clear. And it’s definitely not Belratti.
(6) Belratti – 3 points
[Nobody’s favorite]
Alas, one of my favorite picture-guessing party games did not fare well with my family. I did not vote in these standings. I suppose I should just stick to the tried-and-true Dixit or its spiritual successor Mysterium without trying to innovate with this slightly different 2018 card game. The small box of Belratti made it easier to fit in my suitcase, and I like the twist it adds of alternating roles between submitting cards and guessing pictures. It’s still not clear to me why family members bounced so hard off this one, when games like Dixit have been a huge hit over the years. My suspicion is that the lack of appealing artwork makes this much less interesting to folks than Dixit or Mysterium, and perhaps the guessing feels a bit more random and haphazard given the lack of details in the images. Nonetheless, I’m still a big fan of Belratti, its portability, and the genre of silly card image guessing games across the board.
What games came in fifth through first? Read on to find out…
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Imagine noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) but with the need to think several moves ahead and with each piece having a particular power and control over your opponent. Garden. Try to create the most lines of 3 counters in your colour.
Over the years, the Opinionated Gamers website has made enough of an impression on our hobby that quite a few publishers are interested in us reviewing their games. So it was that about a month ago, Dale, our esteemed editor, got an email message from a gentleman named Matthew Weaver asking if we would like to review their new game Baseball Card GM (henceforth, BCGM). Dale, knowing that I’m a big baseball fan, asked if I would like to check it out and I agreed. So it was that a few days later, a rectangular box showed up at my house and I had a new game to try out.
The game is a family project and they’re self-publishing it. They’ve set up a website which gives the backstory of how it was created. It says, “It all started in 2024, when Garrett Weaver (then just seven) asked ‘How can I actually play with my baseball cards?’ When nothing existed, he and his younger brother Simon invented a set of rules at our dining room table.” Since the game itself involves a fair amount of probability, I have a sneaking suspicion that mom and dad had just a little bit of influence on the final design, but I’m sure that the inspiration for the game came from young Garrett and that he, Simon, and their friends were eager playtesters.
Sports sims, of course, go back almost 100 years (National Pastime may have been the first one and it came out in 1930). My brother and I grew up in the 1960’s and we played simple titles like Challenge the Yankees (back when the NY Yankees were actually winning World Series) and, later, more sophisticated games like Strat-O-Matic Baseball. But these games, like every other baseball simulation, feature special cards for each player, crafted so that they could be used to play an actual game, with each player performing more or less like the statistics put up by their real life counterpart. What Garrett wanted to do was play the same kind of game, but only by using already existing baseball cards and the statistics they all show on their backs. BCGM is his family’s attempt to do just that. (For those not attuned to the world of sports, a General Manager, or GM, is the person in charge of personnel issues on a team, such as putting together a roster, trading for players, and signing free agents.)
The game that showed up on my doorstep comes in a long rectangular, simply adorned cardboard box. Inside is a rolled up neoprene playmat which rolls out to reveal a professionally printed playing area. It looks very nice and lays out nice and flat. The game also contains two large six-sided dice and four glass markers. There are no player cards, of course, because the whole point is to use your own baseball cards to play it with. (When I mentioned to Matthew Weaver that I hadn’t owned baseball cards since I was a kid, he kindly sent me a bunch of packs from the late 80’s.)
The game also includes a couple of single-sheet rule sets, but they aren’t really necessary. They cover the various ways you can draft players to form your teams, but just about any method you wanted to use would work: use the cards from your favorite team, organize a simple draft, have multiple players create their own teams to form a league, etc. The rules suggest that you use the same year for each card (most baseball cards list the stats for every year of its player’s career), but that isn’t strictly necessary—just agree which stats will be used for each card. Once you figure out what everyone’s team is, the rules for how to play a game are all listed on the playmat itself.
Here’s how it works. Take your cards and lay them out in a nine-player lineup (with one player for each fielding position, of course, including a designated hitter). Select a starting pitcher and put down some additional cards to form your bench and bullpen. Then, just as in real baseball, the visiting team sends their leadoff hitter to face off against the home team’s starting pitcher and you’re on your way.
Each batter’s at bat is resolved with a single throw of the two dice. The dice can’t be distinguished from each other, so there are 21 different combinations that can be rolled. The playmat shows all of these combinations, organized into seven different columns associated with different stats that can be found on the back of a baseball card. They are Home Runs, Triples, Doubles, Batting Average, Walks, Hits, and Runs Batted In.
We all know that chicks dig the long ball, so let’s see how this works for the Home Run column. Let’s say the dice come up 1-1. Checking the playmat, we see that there’s a cell in the Home Run column showing 1-1. It lists the following lines:
<15 → Single
≥15 → Home Run
Since this lies in the Home Run column, we need to check the number of homers the current batter hit that year. If he hit fewer than 15, then the result is a single; if he hit 15 or more, then he slams the ball out of the park.
The other dice combination that falls in the Home Run column is 1-2 (which, as I’m sure you all know, comes up twice as often as 1-1). It lists the following lines:
<40 → Fly Out
≥40 → Home Run
If this combination comes up, it will result in a fly out for most batters. (It’s easy to picture the hitter launching a long fly ball, but he doesn’t have quite enough strength to hit it out of the park.) But the elite sluggers, who hit at least 40 homers that year, will be powerful enough to register a four-bagger. Touch ‘em all!
Each of the cells associated with the other dice combinations work the same way. See which stat the combination’s column is associated with, check how well the hitter did with that stat, compare it to what’s listed in the cell, and come up with a result. Thus, through a very simple (and fast) process, it’s easy to find the result of each at bat. Best of all, it’s tied to the statistical performance of the hitter—sluggers will hit more home runs, high average hitters will get more base hits, and so on.
What about the pitchers? BCGM ensures that dominant pitching will influence the outcome of the games. If the opponent’s pitcher had an ERA of 2.25 or less, OR had at least 16 wins that year, OR had at least 36 saves (and these requirements are clearly listed on the playmat), then he will affect the thresholds that the hitter must meet to get their optimal results. Again, let’s look at the Home Run column. Above that column are listed the adjustments that must be made if the pitcher is a dominant one. Baseball fans know that right-handed hitters have a tougher time hitting right-handed pitchers (as do lefties against lefties) than if they’re facing pitchers who pitch from the opposite side, so the game takes that into account. If you’re a right-handed hitter facing a left-handed dominant pitcher, your home run requirements are increased by 3. If, instead, the pitcher is right-handed, your requirement is increased by 6. (The same is true for left-handed batters, but the pitcher’s handedness is naturally reversed.) So let’s say your up against a dominant pitcher and you roll a 1-1. Now, if the pitcher pitches with the opposite hand, you need to have hit 18 homers in order to get a long ball with this cell; otherwise, it’s a single for you. And if the pitcher throws with the same hand, your requirement is now 21 home runs! On a 1-2 result, only the mightiest sluggers can launch a long ball against a dominant pitcher who throws with the same hand—46 blasts are required!
So for each hitter, roll the dice, check which column it falls in, and resolve the result—it’s that simple. Advancing on base hits is handled in a simple way. To see if a runner takes an extra base (if, for example, they score from second on a single, or from first on a double), check how many stolen bases the runner had that year. If they had at least 10 stolen bases, or if there are two outs, they take the extra base; otherwise, they just advance as many bases as the batter does. Nice and easy and again, the ballplayer’s ability affects things—this time, with their speed.
All the normal rules of baseball are followed: three outs ends an inning, whoever has more runs after nine innings wins, if it’s tied, play extra innings. To show who’s on base, just take the hitter who reached base from their lineup position and place them on the base on the diamond shown on the playmat. Then, you advance them based on the results you get. You use the four glass markers to show the half inning, the outs, and the number of runs scored by the visiting team and the home team. Because generating results is so straightforward, it’s easy to finish a full game in 30 minutes or so.
Pitchers are limited to how many innings they can pitch per game, based on how many innings they recorded that year in real life. The rule sheet gives you some simple rules for how many games they need to rest, should you want to simulate a series of games (or even play an entire season). Naturally, you can use your bench players to pinch hit for your starting players, as long as you ensure that you can cover all nine fielding positions.
There’s honestly not too many decisions the two managers need to make once they set their lineups. You can choose to steal bases and your success rate depends on how many steals the player had in real life, but that, pitching changes, and pinch hit decisions are about it. However, that’s really how most baseball sims, even the most sophisticated ones, work. (In his initial note to Dale, Matthew even slyly mentioned his game could be considered an “auto-battler”. Clever boy!) No, the value of the design is how easily and quickly you can play a realistic baseball game and that you can do it with the baseball cards you already own.
And that’s the key thing to remember when you’re deciding on whether to buy BCGM: how well does it deliver on Garrett Weaver’s initial request and if that’s the sort of game you and your family will enjoy. Most baseball sims pride themselves on their statistical accuracy; the player cards are so detailed that if you played a full season, each player’s total numbers would be very close to what they did in real life. BCGM is not that kind of game at all. For example, hitters who slammed between 21 and 39 home runs will perform exactly the same as far as homers are concerned. That’s a pretty big gap. The same is true for all the other categories (there are at most four dice combinations in any single category), so you can’t really call the game an accurate simulation. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that you can use your beloved baseball cards, which many people own hundreds of, to play a real baseball game and the statistics on the cards matter. Not down to the third decimal position, clearly, but Aaron Judge will still easily outperform Aaron Boone. I’m not saying that will appeal to every baseball fan, but I think there’s a bunch of people who will find that enjoyable and delightful.
And the designers actually recommend using those statistical thresholds to game the system. The enclosed sheet gives some tips on how you can draft your team and they mention you should focus on players who exceed the specific levels cited in the dice cells and avoid those players who fall just short of them. So there’s absolutely some ways to take advantage of this and create optimal teams. Actually, the drafting process could be a lot of fun and I’m sure skillful drafting would be very important, just as it is in Fantasy Baseball leagues. Of course, if you just want to play with players from your favorite team and have fun with them, BCGM lets you do that as well.
Because of the tiny number of in-game decisions required, BCGM, like most baseball sims, is easy to play solitaire. Just come up with two teams you want to face off and start rolling dice. All of the ways of playing the game I mentioned above could easily be used to play the game solo, if you wanted to invest the time and, of course, have the baseball cards to use as players.
As a gamer and game designer, I’m quite impressed with how the Weaver family managed to come up with a game from just a bunch of numbers on the backs of baseball cards. I also like how they thought outside of the box and occasionally sacrificed realism to meet their principal goal of making those numbers be meaningful in playing the game. The best example I can give is how fly outs are handled. When a hitter gets a “Fly Out” result, a lead runner on second or third advances one base. In actual baseball, scoring a runner from third on a sacrifice fly is fairly common (although far from automatic), but hitting one far enough to get a runner to move from second to third happens far less often. So, again, this isn’t very realistic. But wait, how do you get a fly out in the game? We’ve already seen one way—when a batter just misses a home run on a 1-2 result. Well, counting that as a really long fly ball seems reasonable. The only other column where a batter can get a fly out is the RBI column. Now Runs Batted In (RBI’s) are a much loved and valuable statistic, but since hitters need other players to be on base in order to get them, figuring out how to model them in a game would be tricky. Well, this is the Weavers’ answer: more sacrifice flies! For each of the RBI dice combinations, if the batter has enough RBIs, he hits a fly ball; if not, it’s merely a groundout (which could turn into a rally-killing double play). Again, we’re sacrificing realism, but it makes the players’ stats matter, by making a high RBI hitter more likely to drive in runs. It’s not the only way they could have done it and baseball purists will probably turn up their noses, but I think it’s a pretty cool solution.
There’s one mild warning I should make. The game claims that it can be played with pretty much any baseball cards from the 1980’s to the current day. I honestly don’t know what backs of current cards look like, but the way the statistics were laid out on the cards that Matthew sent me to play the game varied greatly in their usefulness. Some didn’t include all of the stats needed to play the game and many of them used very small fonts to display the stats. The cards from Donruss were much better than the other ones and made the game easy to play, but I would have been hard pressed to use some of the others. Now, I’m about 60 years older than Garrett and his friends, so I imagine they’re far better equipped to make out tiny numbers, but I’d still take a look at the cards you intend to use before you decide if this is a game for you. Although I see that the purchased version of the game comes with a “wallet-sized magnifier”, so even that may not be a disqualifier!
Other than a game box which is merely functional, BCGM’s components are surprisingly professional for what is essentially one family’s labor of love. The dice are good quality and are nice and large and the glass markers are fine. But the real star of the show (and pretty much the entire game) is the playmat and it’s very well done. As I mentioned earlier, it’s sturdy and lays out flat, making it a breeze to play on. Everything you need to play the game is very clear, easy to read, and logically laid out. It should be easy for youngsters to figure out, even without adults to guide them. The text and illustrations are bold and attractive. There are also some nice details in the depiction of the baseball field which are fun additions. It’s not flowery or “pretty”, but I don’t think that would have been the right approach. It was important that they did a good job with the playmat and they nailed it.
So who might like this game? Obviously, not those who demand a realistic simulation, as I’ve mentioned. But anyone who has a supply of baseball cards who wants a fast and easy game should at least consider it. Something like Pizza Box Baseball, which used to be quite popular, is a good comp as far as complexity is concerned, except BCGM is even easier to learn. It’s ideal for baseball loving kids, but could also be a great family game, that parents and other adults can play with children. Because there are so few decisions made during the game, gamers of any age can participate in an engaging half hour of play and have pretty much even odds of winning. Of course, if you want to put in the effort of drafting your teams, there’s a good deal of skill that can be applied, but that’s not a requirement to enjoy the game—just form your teams by any means you like, start rolling the dice, and have fun playing baseball. Plenty of adults love collecting cards as well and I can see them as potential owners, possibly even developing leagues and playing full seasons. The game’s most obvious appeal, of course, is the ability to use the baseball cards you love to collect and let the players function in a realistic fashion. That’s a great feature and something that should be attractive to quite a few gamers. If that sounds like it might be of interest, the game is currently available for sale at their website, www.baseballcardgm.com.
To summarize, Baseball Card GM is an innovative, clever, and logically designed sports game for folks who have baseball card collections and are interested in playing a fast and easy to understand title. It’s an ideal family game and simple enough for young kids to play among themselves or with their parents. It plays well with two or as a solitaire game. As you probably know, when writing a review of any sports themed game, I’m required by law to provide a tagline that uses the sport’s parlance. I won’t say that BCGM hits it out of the park, since it’s not for everyone. But in real-life baseball, when a player comes up in the bottom of the ninth and the winning run is on third, it’s foolish to swing for the fences when a line-drive single will get the job done. And that’s just what the Weaver family did with this game—they concentrated on answering the question their young son asked and came up with something unique that filled the bill. And there’s nothing wrong with creating a game that’s a game-winning hit. Play ball!
Postscript: After writing this review, I exchanged emails with Matthew Weaver about how BCGM was designed. It was indeed a joint effort between him and Garrett. Garrett not only asked the original question, but came up with a few key ideas, including how to use pitchers in the game, and was the principal solo playtester, which included recording numerous scorecards that Matthew needed to make the game work as intended. Matthew did the rest, but the two of them definitely worked together to create and fine-tune the game. That’s one impressive 8-year-old kid!
