Satchel’s Ball Game

The tagline reads a Salute to the Negro Leagues for that was my goal. Create a fun baseball sim. I enjoy baseball. I also wanted a simple simulation. The other games I’ve seen lack fun; they are too stat driven and entertain about as poorly as a statistics exam. This booklet presents baseball fast and with good humor.

You can play this as a one-off, a few innings or a complete game. Play a two out of three series. You can manage a team for a barnstorming season. You can try to build to a championship. The system works solo or against a buddy.

If you don’t know how to play baseball, the four bases, the scoring, some of the lesser understood rules, I’m not trying to teach the game. There’s How-to and videos online. Yet, you could be lost. You may have to spend a buck to know what you know. If you’ve ever played or seen a game, you’ll likely be fine.

This is not nuanced. It’s designed to be more than poker dice but certainly not Moneyball. You probably only need to know this basic truth: that at the end of the nine innings, the team with the higher score wins. How they get there is never the same.

Is there something special that I’m writing this as homage for the Colored player? I’ve always been a fan of Satchel Paige, an athlete that played in five decades. Yet I’m also avoiding the rather litigious nature of MLB®. As a game designer, I’ll try to make this campaign cover an historic perspective. It’s grown-ups playing a kid’s game. All in good fun. The US changed as did baseball.

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