Baseball Highlights 2045

The Game

Baseball Highlights 2045, released in 2015, is designed by Mike Fitzgerald, who is famous for the Mystery Rummy series. I am a fan of the series, so this game piqued my interest. Unfortunately this was not widely available in Malaysia when it was first released. Only recently I noticed a 2nd-hand copy on the market, so I went for it. 

The game reimagines baseball in the year 2045. The sport has gone into decline for some time, but is now revived due to introduction of robot players and cyborg players. The human players are still the most popular ones. They are good in defence, and due to their popularity, they generate the most income for their teams. Robots are the best hitters, but are not as popular as their human counterparts. The cyborgs are the best pitchers. Each type of player has its own unique strengths. 

Baseball Highlights 2045 is mainly a deck-building card game. It does not directly translate the rules and mechanisms of baseball into a table top game form. Instead it uses abstracted and simplified mechanisms to convey the intense competition between two baseball teams. It is primarily a two player game, but you can do 4-players in a tournament mode, and you can also play it solo against an AI. 

You play a series of mini-games. Typically you play best of 7, which means you will play at least 4 mini-games, and at most 7. Within each mini-game, you play only six cards. When a mini-game ends, the six cards played generate income, which you use for buying new cards. For each new card (baseball player) purchased, you must retire one of those six players who have just played. Your team size (i.e. your card deck) stays constant at 15. As you play mini-game after mini-game, your deck becomes stronger as you recruit better players and retire the weaker starting players. You must pay attention to the players your opponent buys, so that you can adjust your deck and your play accordingly. 

Game setup is simple. Two player boards, two shuffled starting decks, and six free agent cards. The free agents are the players you will get to buy at the end of every mini-game. The pawns represent potential hits. The colours represent runner speed, with red being the fastest runners, and white the slowest. 

Card functions can be divided into two parts. The big box is for immediate actions, while the rest are threats and special abilities. The game flow is a little unconventional. Even if you know baseball well, the procedure may feel weird initially, as if two separate matches are being played concurrently on two separate fields. Let me explain how a player turn works. 

On your turn, you just play one card. The first thing you do is resolve any text in the immediate action box. Sometimes this lets you defend against threats made by your opponent on his most recently played card. Sometimes this gives you extra offense abilities. Once the immediate actions are resolved, you switch to look at your opponent's board. On his most recent turn, he might have issued threats. You now resolve such threats. This means he is going to create hits which you have been unable to or have decided not to prevent. He may score points at this time. Once you are done resolving hits on your opponent's board, you return to your own board to issue your own threats. You are now setting up your own offense. Normally you just look at the threat boxes (grey rectangles) on the card you have just played, and place hitters on your board. Your card specifies whether these hits are singles (hitter and runners will move one base), doubles (two bases), triples or home runs. It also specifies whether the player is a fast, medium or slow runner, which affects how fast he runs when he is on 1st to 3rd base. Your hits are not resolved yet. You need to wait for your opponent's turn to give him an opportunity to react. 

So a player turn is divide into three phases. The first and third are you doing stuff, while the second one is your opponent doing stuff. 

The longer track at the top is the score for the current mini-game. The shorter one on the left is how many mini-games you have won so far. The draw deck is at the top right. The space at the bottom right is your discard pile. At the bottom left you may place an On Deck card. At the start of a mini-game, you may put one of your hand cards here then draw a replacement. During play, you may discard a card with a Pinch Hitter icon to play this On Deck card instead of a card from your hand, or play a card from the top of your deck. This represents you bringing in a specific player to bat when you are in a critical situation, or betting your luck on your deck because no other players in hand can deal with the difficult situation you are in. You can use this On Deck mechanism to put a good player in reserve and wait for the right moment to summon him. If you don't use him in the current mini-game you can still use him next mini-game. You can also use the On Deck mechanism to get rid of weak players. At the end of a mini-game, you can choose to discard your On Deck card. It is usually good to use the On Deck option, because effectively you will be seeing 7 cards instead of 6. You have more flexibility. 

In the photo above, I have runners on 1st and 2nd base. However the current played card has no threats - no grey rectangle. So I am not threatening any hits, and those two runners will not be going anywhere yet. 

In this photo above, I have two pawns on the home base, representing my threats to hit. On the card just played, there are two grey rectangles which are Singles. Thus the two pawns. These pawns are red because the runner icon on the card (bottom left) is red. 

White runners are the slowest. They move as many bases as the batter's hit. If the batter hits a Single, they advance one base. If the batter hits a Double, two bases, and so on. Blue runners are similar to white runners, except if they are on 2nd base, they will always run back to the home base and score. Red runners are fast and they run one base more than the batter's hit. 

Player type (natural, robot and cyborg) plays an important role. Many abilities in the game apply specifically to a certain type, e.g. cancelling all hits by a robot player. It is important to know the player type distribution of your opponent, and buy the right cards which are good against his majority type. 

The Play

When Michelle and I first played, we followed the recommendation in the rulebook and played the 3+7 format - 3 season matches and 7 tournament matches. This format is recommended for new players, to allow them more time to learn the game mechanisms. We found this a slog. The starting players were uninteresting. The idea of possibly needing to play 10 matches back-to-back was daunting. We didn't manage to finish the game. The next time we played, we used the standard format, which doesn't have the three season matches. It has three rounds of buying players, and then jumps right into the tournament matches - best of 7. Playing this format was much more fun. With the standard format, we already had purchased (i.e. better) players in our first mini-game. With only 15 cards in your deck, and every mini-game typically using 6 or 7 cards, you have to reshuffle almost once every other game, and players which have played before will start making appearances again. 

This is a game about denying your opponent. The cards come with a wide variety of abilities, and you always want to utilise them to the max. The tricky part is sometimes you don't know for sure when the best time is to play a card. You aren't even sure a decent time will come up in the current mini-game at all. Let's say you have a card which cancels all hits by a robot. Are you going to hold on to it until your opponent plays a strong robot card? Does he have one in hand in the first place? If he doesn't have one then you may be wasting other better opportunities to play your card. It's not always easy to determine when the best time is to play a card. 

At the start of a mini-game, when you draw your hand of six cards, you already need to formulate a rough plan how to play your hand. It sounds like a simple exercise of just deciding on the sequence of playing your cards, but there are quite a few details you have to consider. In general you want to get many players onto the bases, and then hit a homerun or a big hit to get them back to the home base to score points. That's one angle in planning your hand - how to score efficiently and utilise as many of your threats as possible. Another angle is how to defend. Depending on how your opponent plays, you may find that you need specific cards to defend against his moves, and that may disrupt your initial plans. Yet another consideration is the metagame. If you remember well how your opponent has built his deck, you will be thinking not only about the card he has just played, but also what cards he may still have in hand. If you know he has many cyborgs, even if he has just played one, you may not spend your anti-cyborg card to counter this one. He may be baiting you with this cyborg. So you may want to hold on to your anti-cyborg card and wait for another even stronger cyborg card from him. 

Normally you keep score using the round token at the bottom right. When Michelle and I played, we found it easier to just use runners who made it back to home base. Those cards tucked under the player board are players who have been fired from the team. They now go to play in the minor league. 

They look like spectators. 

The first two cards are robots. Notice the keyword just below the profile pictures. Robots are generally good hitters, so they tend to have more threat icons (grey rectangles). The card on the right is a human, i.e. a natural. 

Within a mini-game, if both players are at the same score after having played all six cards, you go into extra innings. Both players draw 3 cards and pick 1 to play simultaneously. You resolve both cards and see if anyone outscores the other. If you are still tied, you pick another card from the remaining two. This goes on until the tie is broken.

Michelle and I played one very exciting tournament. Our matches won went up to 3:3, which meant we had to play the final 7th match. By then both our teams were strong. Most of them were purchased players and only a few original players remained. This photo above was our line-ups in that final match. Only Michelle still had one original player, the second one in the first row. 

Imagine holding one of these rows of cards in your hand. When you count the grey rectangles (threats), you get a rough idea how many points you can potentially score. Some immediate actions allow you to score more. Playing a mini-game is a process of converting these threats to points. You try to maximise your conversions, while disrupting your opponent's conversions as much as possible. Offense and defence. 

The Thoughts

Baseball Highlights 2045 is a very flavourful game. Despite not being a mechanism port from real baseball, the design does convey the excitement of a tight back-and-forth match. A direct mechanism port would probably be too tedious. You play a series of microgames, and you only play 6 cards in each microgame. However these microgames are all linked together. From microgame to microgame, you gradually improve and finetune your deck of cards, and you see your deck-building produce results and powerful plays. There is a memory element, because you need to remember which cards your opponent has bought, and also which ones you yourself have bought. 

It is exciting not knowing what cards your opponent has in hand. Often you are not sure whether a much feared card is in there waiting for you to play a card which it can totally shut down. When a mini-game starts, you have much flexibility. As the mini-game progresses and more and more cards are played, you have fewer options to respond to your opponent's plays. You need to consider both maximising your scoring and staying agile in defence. It is not always possible to utilise all the abilities of your cards. You need to decide what to sacrifice. 

There are many baseball terms in the game. Baseball lovers will enjoy this. I don't know baseball well, so some of the terms don't mean anything to me. I have to look them up to understand what they mean in real baseball, to better appreciate how these real-life baseball rules have been translated into boardgame form. The game rules are clear, so even if you don't know baseball at all, you can still play and enjoy the game well. You'll just miss a little warm familiar feeling.