Designer Diary: 7th Inning Stretch, or Game Design Is 90% Mental, and the Other Half Is Physical | BoardGameGeek News

by Justin Schroeder

There is, perhaps, no greater analogy for game design than baseball. To the casual observer, baseball is long and boring and has lots of arcane rules. Getting to the game itself is often grueling and expensive. (Pop quiz: What hurts more, both emotionally and financially: trying to find a parking spot near Wrigley Field or cutting out 132 polyomino tiles from foam floor mats with an X-acto knife?) And to top it off, a success rate anywhere in the neighborhood of 30% is often viewed as a huge success.

But underneath the veneer of monotony, both baseball and game design hide a litany of minor decisions and events that have a major impact on the final outcome. Sometimes a long fly ball hooks inches foul at the last moment. Maybe a 3-2 pitch barely catches the black trim on home plate and puts an end to a big rally. Or perhaps an umpire’s blown call on the 27th out of a perfect game ruins a historic moment. (Sorry, Tigers fans.)

On their own, these events are mere blips in a season that features nearly 2,500 games and over 700,000 pitches thrown — but in the proper context, they can be the difference between the joy of victory and the agony of defeat.

What follows is a brief tale of the many isolated little moments that bonded together to form 7th Inning Stretch.

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1st inning: The lead-off hitter for this adventure is my ten-year-old self rolling dice on his bedroom floor. Growing up in rural Indiana with no cable or internet, we had to invent ways to entertain ourselves, and my favorite one involved dice and a blank baseball scorebook. I would spend hours rolling the dice, consulting a rudimentary chart, and recording the results. The system was simple, and it wrote some compelling stories. (Computing all the stats also sent me down the dangerous road to becoming a mathematician, but that’s a story for another day.)

But the game lacked any player agency. There were no substitutions to make, no stolen bases to attempt, and though “dice manipulation” was not a phrase in my vocabulary at the time, there was none of that, either. I was the audience for the stories, not the author. I longed for something more meaningful. I want…wait, was that a raindrop I felt?

[Sorry, 7th Inning Stretch is currently in a 27-year rain delay. Please find cover while we wait for the skies to clear!]

2nd inning: Fast forward to 2021, when my passion for board games as an adult has grown to the same heights as my love for baseball as a kid, and I set about designing my dream sports game. It still used dice to tell stories, but now the player was in the driver’s seat. You got to draft players, set your lineup, choose your strategy, and manipulate the dice as you competed to win the championship. It was everything I had hoped for!

There was only one problem: I moved to Europe during the lengthy rain delay, so the baseball game of my dreams somehow came out as a football/soccer-themed game called Pocket World Cup.

I had a lot of fun both making and playing the game, but the ten-year-old kid who memorized Barry Larkin stats was not quite satisfied. There was only…oh no, not again!

[Bring out the tarp! 7th Inning Stretch is currently experiencing another rain delay.]

3rd inning: One fascinating thing about game design is that it requires the use of a wide array of skills, such as mathematics, storytelling, graphic design, arts & crafts, and marketing. I have found that my aptitude for these skills decreases strongly as you progress through the list, which means that I enjoy creating games, but I have a hard time getting them noticed.

Thus, the email I got from Gabe Barrett following the end of a three-year rain delay came straight out of left field. He asked whether I would consider remaking Pocket World Cup into a baseball game for the “Solo Game of the Month” series from Best With 1 Games. Somewhat astonished — and a little embarrassed I didn’t think of that myself…I mean, “Pocket World Series” would make a perfect counterpart for Pocket World Cup! — I happily agreed.

4th inning: There is often a lull in the middle innings of a baseball game, and the same can be true of designing games. With the excitement of a new project and a signed contract in the rearview mirror — and the satisfaction of holding a published version of my game still a ways off in the future — I dove into the grunt-work cycle of prototyping, printing, and playing.

The first challenge was figuring out how to spread a single offensive dice roll in the football/soccer version of the game to nine individual rolls representing each batter in a lineup, all while maintaining some sort of team unity. The solution was to have one collective pool of resources that each player could then access individually. This opened the door for different types of ballplayers — some generate lots of resources at the cost of an automatic out, while others don’t provide any resources but use them efficiently — that could create interesting team-level combos while maintaining some level of independence as they each perform their individual at-bat.

5th inning: The next challenge was figuring out how to capture all the special minutiae that baseball enthusiasts love without creating a game that was overly long or complex. An offensive inning progresses at-bat by at-bat, rather than pitch by pitch, so each plate appearance can be resolved in a manner of seconds. Games were shortened to three innings — long enough to use every batter in your lineup at least once, but short enough that you could finish a game in under five minutes — and the season was shortened to six games.

Obscure rules like balks and ground-rule doubles are nonexistent, while stolen bases and pinch-hitters are placed in the background; they are easy to incorporate if you want to use your full offensive arsenal, but easy to ignore if you want a more streamlined experience.

Most importantly, zooming in on a few key moments of the season and removing some of the weird edge cases left room to highlight the really interesting decisions: Do you pull your starting pitcher and try to keep the game close, or leave him in and save your better pitchers for the next game? Do you throw caution to the wind in hopes of a big inning, or play it safe and settle for one run? Do you build up your bullpen at the trading deadline, or bring in some heavy hitters to slug your way to the title?

6th inning: My design process is, on the whole, very inefficient. I hate playtesting with pieces of paper, so I will design, print, and cut cards for every version of a game I make, which goes against the number one piece of advice most experienced designers give.

I was overly pleased, then, to find a case where I could fix two issues with a single curveball. On one hand, the game suffered from a case of home-field disadvantage: Managing your pitchers’ stamina is a key element of your strategy, and that proved to be a lot easier as the visiting team. On the other hand, the game still needed a good name! “Pocket World Series” seemed like the obvious choice, but it was a bit of a misnomer; even though Gabe manages to pack a lot of punch into a small box, it doesn’t actually fit in your pocket.

Enter 7th Inning Stretch. Each mini-game now starts in the bottom of the 7th inning — immediately following the titular break — providing both a definite advantage to the home team (they get an extra turn on offense!) and the perfect name.

7th inning: A misunderstanding led to what was nearly my greatest gaming moment of all time. Gabe emailed to ask whether I could add more “players” to the game. Since the design was strictly a solitaire game at this point, I assumed he wanted me to expand the player count.

It turns out he wanted more player cards in the game, but my response ended up accidentally accomplishing both goals. I added enough cards to support two players and, with only a few tweaks to the rules about how you draft your team, challenged my wife to a game. She had never played before and is not really a baseball fan, so I did my best to explain the basics to her, hoping that the resulting bloodbath wouldn’t be so bad that it discouraged her from ever playing again. She won 4-1.

Convinced something was wrong, we played a rematch. Apparently, the first game was no fluke because she immediately took the lead in the first inning and held a 5-2 lead heading to the final three innings. Thankfully I had knocked out all of her pitchers, so I had free rein coming down the stretch. I scored once in each of the 7th and 8th innings to pull within one, then loaded the bases with two outs in the ninth. I had a single die in my pool for the last batter, knowing a 5 or 6 would win the game, while a 4 would be enough to tie the game and send it to extra innings. Anything less, and she would win. I paused to savor the fact that this new game was already creating some intense moments, then threw the die.

You probably already know the outcome, but the two pips showing on the die were two fewer than I needed.

Who designed this stupid game anyway?!?

8th inning: The last hurdle to clear before I could sleep peacefully at night was how to handle the playoffs. Originally, each of the two rounds was played as a best-of-seven series, which was fun in its own way (and is now an official variant for experienced players), but also created a weird game arc. In the regular season, you played six games and added six players to your team, whereas in the playoffs, you could end up playing fourteen playoff games without adding a single player to your roster.

Gabe suggested two fixes that fit seamlessly with the overall game experience: The playoffs are now a best-of-three series, and you get to add two new players to your team before you start the playoffs (representing players coming off the injured reserve). The result is a postseason that feels appropriately challenging while ensuring you still get the thrills of playing all three roles — GM, manager, and players — for your team.

9th inning: Heading to the final frame with a comfortable lead, I happily turned the game over to my closer: the wonderful design and development team at Best With 1 Games. As you can see from the images, they clearly knocked it out of the park! The player cards evoke many fond memories of trading cards from the early 1990s, and the double-layered game boards and wooden markers give it a deluxe feel.

I hope the game will appeal not only to baseball fans, but to anyone who enjoys the puzzle of engine building and dice manipulation. Either way, one thing is clear: My ten-year-old self would have loved this game!

Justin Schroeder