by Max Jamelli
What do I mean by the pain? Not in the literal sense (not unless you are prone to paper cuts from playing cards) but in the mental sense. One of the features of Lords of Baseball is that with 1 card you can do several things. This is one of the concepts I took from Founding Fathers (a game in which you can vote, debate, event, or discard a single card) I also drew some inspiration from another Mathews game - Twilight Struggle in that there are some "mandatory events" that are discarded after play as well as some "scoring" cards that allow players to score VP for performing an action.As in Founding Fathers, you can do several things with cards in LoB. There are two events on most cards - one event that can be played in the off-season and one that can be played during the regular season. If neither event suits you, you can play the OP value of the card.
The OPS values are either 2, 3, or 4.
You can play OPS in a few ways:
- You can combo your OPS for team wins (combo with Superstars on roster, All-Stars on roster and/or Field Manager)
- You can play OPS against players for losses (1:1 ratio)
- You can play OPS against players to force roster adjustment (2:1 OPS to Journeyman ratio)
Wins for yourself is always a good thing - but you can only combo Superstars, All-Stars, or Managers once per phase (there are three phases to a season).
Losses for your opponents is nice too - but there are limits to the number of times a player can be "attacked". Players can only be hit with OPS twice per phase and by events once. These attacks are tracked on each player mat in the event/action section (lower middle)
The pain becomes choosing the best way to use each card - because you only get 9 cards to use throughout the season. There are ways to purchase cards as you go through the season, but it's not cheap. The player who can maximize the use of his cards the best will often times be in great shape.
As with any CDG, first time players often spend time reading through their hand of cards and trying to formulate a plan on how to use them. As with many CDG, after the first few rounds of play - that plan needs to be adjusted on the fly. For the designers, that's one of the things we look at as a positive about the game. Since baseball is often a reactionary game (manager brings in the lefty from the pen, I'll send up my righty pinch hitter) it made sense to us that a game that simulates the economics of the game has a reactionary feel to it as well.
Over the next few blog posts, I'll post examples of some of the cards and some of the pain that we expect players to deal with.