Opening Day for this next season of Baseball is March 25th, which usually means two things: eternal hope for your team and a sudden, desperate urge to look at box scores. If you’re the kind of person who sees a 3-for-4 line and starts imagining the trajectory of those hits, you should probably be playing Deadball.
Right now, Bundle of Holding has a collection of the game for $9.95. For less than the price of a stadium beer, you’re getting about $50 worth of stuff, including the Second Edition core rules and a bunch of season-specific supplements.
Deadball is a fast-play dice game by W.M. Akers. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s a bit of a polymath; he wrote the Comrades RPG and some great alt-history mystery novels. He’s also a die-hard Mets fan (oh, dear…) who clearly understands that baseball is essentially a game of maths and storytelling.
The beauty of Deadball is that it doesn’t require a degree in accounting. It uses the stats you already know (Batting Average, ERA) and turns them into target numbers for your dice. You can finish a full nine-inning game in 20 minutes.
The $9.95 price tag for this bundle gets you the Second Edition (the polished, 2022 version), the 1909 historical edition (for when you want to simulate a time when home runs were rare and pitchers threw until their arms fell off), and the Year II, III, and IV supplements. Those supplements give you the stats for the 2022-2024 seasons, so you can play with modern rosters immediately.
Akers hits on something important: the best version of baseball is the one that happens in your head. Whether you’re listening to a game on the radio or rolling dice on your coffee table, you’re the one filling in the gaps between the numbers. Deadball is just a really efficient engine for that.
If you want to pit the legends of the dead-ball era against today’s all-stars, or just manage a fictional team of your own making, this is the easiest way to do it.
You can click here to visit the bundle page over at Bundle of Holding.
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