Blaseball
Review

Blaseball (2020) is an online baseball simulation. Unusually though, it blends in an absurd horror story where players are incinerated and the rules can change -- a little like the board game Blood Bowl. Players compete not so much to get their team to win, but to predict the outcome so they can then have more voting power to change the course of the game.

To start you choose a team and are given some coins. You bet these coins on the outcome of a simulated series of matches for each season that lasts one week. You also get coins when your team wins. You get coins if the player you idolise in the game gets home runs or strikes out other players.

Matches are played every day on the hour. You can watch these games unfold live as the game stats are updated by the simulation. Then, at the end of the season, there are wild card, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals culminating on Saturday.

Between seasons, on Sunday, players can use any coins they have won through betting correctly on matches, to improve the stats of their team with Blessings (or steal other team's players) and vote for special events or even Decrees that change next season's rules.

This evolving, crowd-controlled, aspect of the game has attracted a large online community of players. As the game has evolved through its first 11 seasons all manner of fan-fiction, lore, art and team Twitter accounts have been created by players. This is then incorporated into the team pages of the game.

It's a game designed to bring people together. And it does this by granting a degree of control to players while retaining an overarching plot and mystery. What started as a small indie game for a few friends is fast developing the kind of attention and fans usually associated with big franchises like Star Wars.

Currently, Blaseball is on a break so you can't play as there are no active seasons. The developer states that "Blaseball will be back. We plan to bring you more exciting action every week. But to do that, we need some time to fix bugs, add some features, make the machines bigger, and breathe. Our team is exhausted and overworked. We need a little time to recoup so Blaseball can come back stronger than ever."

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Blaseball 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 10 weeks ago.