Baseball - Review

Baseball

This is a Piecepack game, meaning you need to have a Piecepack in order to play. For this particular game you'll also need a standard deck of cards ( remove the jokers ). Then of course you'll need the game itself which comes as a pdf.

Print the PDF once and repeat page 6 you'll need a page 6 for each player.

When your done printing you have the Piecepack, 5 pages of clear and easy to follow rules. A sheet depicting the Baseball diamond and the innings trackers. Each player will have a play mat in front of them showing the outfield and spaces for catcher and the pitchers.

Setting Up : Each player gets two sets of tiles, coins and pawns from the Piecepack. They also get one suit of the Red and Black cards from the deck of cards. Each player stacks three cards in his pitcher pile places one tile on the catcher space and the rest get placed in the various spots in the outfield.

Placement in the outfield is important as some spots receive more balls than others and so you'll want your better catchers there.

The Batting player works his way through the team tiles placed on his outfield map, using one of his pawn to indicate which tile is batting at any one time.

Playing a pitch is straight forward. The player Pitching places down a black card from hand of standard cards. The Batter does likewise from the Red cards. The Batter rolls three of the dice, removes any that match his currently batting tile. The remain dice are totaled. Then the cards are turned over. If the Batters card is higher then 2 is added to the die total, if the Pitchers card is higher then 2 is subtracted.

This final score references a small chart which indocates, outs, homers or where in the outfield the ball has gone. If the balls is in the air then the receiving tile has an opportunity to catch the ball. The Pitching player rolls a die, if it scores less than the number on the tile then the ball is caught and the Batter is OUT!

There are a number of variations to this basic system. Some allow extra plays for stealing bases and that sort of thing. You can also optionally play through your pitchers if they start getting into trouble.

The game plays for a basic 5 innings, and I suppose you could play more if you end up with a draw.

What did I think of this game? I thought it was OK, a simple and very quick to play game that an enthusiast is going to find fun and a hardened gamer mildly interesting.

I liked it, and am very glad I had a Piecepack so I could try it out very quickly. If your into Print and Play I suggest you get yourself a Piecepack and check out the hundreds of games available for free.