Designed by: Mike Fitzgerald
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, we are playing baseball. We’re playing a slightly different version, with cyborgs and robots, but we’re playing!
In Baseball Highlights 2045 the players face off in a battle to be top team. Everyone (although we think the game is best with 2) starts with their own team, represented by a deck of cards, full of rookies and veterans. In 2045, both teams bat at the same time, so each player also has a baseball pitch in front of them where they’ll play cards, and send batters running around the famous diamond.
Play is fairly simple. From a hand of player cards, you play one and follow the instructions on it: often ‘threatening’ a hitter will run a single (to first base) or a double (to second). Whenever a hitter runs, all runners ahead of him move as well. But before that happens, your opponents get to play a card as well. Some cards have defensive actions on them; they might cancel hits or particular types of hits, or pick off a runner and put them out of the game. And the game continues in this fashion, with all sides playing a single card in turn and actioning the effects, as runners record runs. When the cards run out, the most runs wins that game.
That’s the basic turn-by-turn situation, but Baseball Highlights also has a larger structure to it as well. Three games are played to determine ‘home advantage’, and then a seven-game series is played, with the first to four winning. After each game, real-life players get to purchase new (and significantly better!) baseball players from an available tableau of cards, and it’s this recruitment that gives the game a sense of narrative and real-world relevance. Just like a real sports manager, you’re recruiting players you hope will swing things your way. Sometimes the games end in ties, which triggers a single-card (from a choice of three) extra innings face-off: these are extraordinarily tense and can throw up surprises!
A fair bit of take that - many cards wreck havoc with your dreams. But it's a competition, and cyborgs can be unforgiving.
Very low - almost absent.
You have a hand of cards and need to select one to play - easy. But, as you get more familiar with the game, you'll spot opportunities to play cards in a certain order, or plan for particular things to happen.
Lots of variety here in how things play. Strategically you can go defensive or aggressive. Tactically you can shift gears. There's plenty of cards in the base game, but there are expansions available also.
2-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Apart from swinging a bat and the lamentations of Charlie Brown, I know nothing about baseball. I'm not madly into robots and the visual style of the game didn't exactly entice me - so I did not anticipate enjoying this as much as I did. An initial sense of confusion fell away very quickly as we followed the back-and-to of turns, and if there was some terminology I didn't recognise (pinch hitter; clutch) what everything does is actually very straightforward. There's a few extra things we've not covered here but nothing too onerous. Highly interactive, very thematic, and very more-ish!