THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Rally, what if you made “1” single, “2” other safe?

For 1/single, a roll of 1-4 moves runners 1 bases, and 5-6 moves runners 2 bases.

For 2/other, roll of 1-3 walk, 4,5,6 for double, triple, HR.

We need to have 12 woba points (for the 12 times on base, out of 36 rolls).  6 singles if 5.4 wOBA points.  3 walks is 2.1, double+triple is 2.8 points, 2 for the HR.  That’s 12.3 wOBA points.

Maybe for your kid when in elementary school…

Good idea.

If you feel like getting more ideas, download this:

http://www.tabletop-sports.com/modules.php?name=UpDownload&req=getit&lid=2051

It’ll be a zip file of a PDF.  Go to page 5 and onwards of the PDF file. 

This is by far my favorite board game…

I’m looking at the cartoon at the bottom of your list of active threads.

A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers.  Let’s use them to build narratives.

I think that is the key to enjoying this game.

The link was only meant to give you more inspiration if you needed.  That’s all…

I would have been OBSESSED with this as a wee child.

Just on the subject of super-simple baseball games, my 4-year old daughter and I have been playing Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball a lot. She loves it and requests it all the time.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5306/harrys-grand-slam-baseball-game

Basically, for a 4-year old it’s perfect because you don’t need to read at all to play it well. Outs and hits are distinguished by symbols on the cards. Play the outs when you’re pitching, play the hits when you’re hitting. When Daddy gets a guy on base, play the double play and laugh. But it still achieves the goal of teaching the baseball fundamentals (3 outs, moving around the bases).

I tweaked this a little.

1) Tried to have most plays resolved in one roll of one dice to make it even quicker and easier.

2) Incorporated Tom’s “other safe” suggestion.

3) Made good results universally better at the high end of the dice.  So 6-6 would be a HR like in APBA and to add to the feel of the game.

4) Add a few optional rolls with risk/reward to add some basic baseball strategy and excitement. 

At Bat
Roll Result
1 K
2 GO
3 PO
4 FO
5 Single
6 “Other Safe”

“Other Safe”
Roll Result
1 Walk
2 Walk
3 Walk
4 Double
5 Triple
6 HR

OPTIONAL ROLLS

Stolen Base
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Out
3 Runner Holds
4 Safe
5 Safe
6 Safe

Advance Extra Base
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Out(Safe w/2 out)
3 Runner Holds (Safe w/2 out)
4 Safe
5 Safe
6 Safe

FO Tag Up (From 2nd or 3rd)
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Out
3 Runner Holds
4 Runner Holds
5 Safe
6 Safe

SAC Bunt
Roll Result
1 DP
2 Force Out
3 SAC
4 SAC
5 SAC
6 All Safe

GO DP Chance
Roll Result
1 DP
2 DP
3 DP
4 DP
5 Force Out
6 FO w/ 1b Error

If anyone has any further suggestions or tweaks please share.

Way too many outs on advances, that’s for sure.  For SB, I’d go with 3 safe, 1 out, 2 holds.

For advances, 4, 1, 1.

Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to declare your target age group, so we know how simple to keep this.

I was originally thinking that it might make sense to make the risk slightly higher than normal to keep the chances down, especially on advances.

After thinking about it some more I like your SB suggestion.  I also added another layer for steals of 3b to it.  On advances, how about 3,2,1 with an extra 2 out safe?

Here are revised charts:

Stolen Base
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Runner Holds (Out at 3b)
3 Runner Holds
4 Safe (Runner Holds at 2b)
5 Safe
6 Safe

Advance Extra Base
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Runner Holds (Safe w/2 out)
3 Runner Holds (Safe w/2 out)
4 Safe
5 Safe
6 Safe

As for target age, I was thinking 5-106. Please make any suggestions that come to mind.

I’m guessing you had a problem with the number of outs on the tag up chart to so I revised that too:

FO Tag Up (From 2nd or 3rd)
Roll Result
1 Out
2 Runner Holds
3 Runner Holds
4 Safe (Runner Holds at 2b)
5 Safe
6 Safe