JUST ROLL THE DICE
CFL fans rave about board game from ’70s
The most momentous birthday present I ever received came in a brown box, with a nice little rattling sound when you shook it.
The contents of that box were life-altering: Dice, cards, twopiece baseball field, scoresheets, rules. My parents gave the young me a board game — Avalon Hill’s Superstar Baseball, to be exact — with a photo of Babe Ruth on the box-top, and this breathless wording on the back:
“The game that lets YOU manage great stars of different eras from out of the past ... to see how they would perform against each other.”
Oh, gosh. What a revelation. “Just imagine! All-star games that would pit all the greatest stars — not just those of any one year — against each other in games real-life managers just dream of.”
You had me with that first sentence.
“YOU are the manager! YOU choose the lineups! YOU call the shots!”
At which point I tore the game open, devoured the rules, gloried in the players represented on the “computer analyzed” cards. Babe Ruth! Rogers Hornsby! Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown! Willie Mays! Duke Snider! Cy Young! Jackie Robinson! Ty Cobb!
What a pandemic-isolation gift that would have been.
I played the game until it fell apart. Then I repaired it with tape, and kept playing. Days, months, years. Players were drafted to play on six different, and permanent, teams (Ruth and Hank Aaron landed with the Red Sox; Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson with the Expos) and played entire seasons, recorded meticulously with handwritten stats for each player, observing baseball niceties like pitching rotations and injuries of varying severities.
The game cemented, and deepened, my love for sports history. Each card-back contained the player’s stats (which I memorized), and several lines about their careers, with a few fun facts thrown in: (“‘Bucketfoot Al’ was a great batter despite an unusual stance with his left foot pointed toward third base.”)
I played through high school, through college, and into my working life as a sports writer. Sometimes, the box got stowed away for a few months, or a few years. Then the bug bit, and it got another fevered go-around.
The original game is now an ugly ruin. Time and attention have it looking like a crushed car at an auto-wrecker, so I picked up a fresh copy on ebay a while back.
There’s more realistic baseball board games out there, but for pure fun (and, frankly, nostalgia), Superstar Baseball sits alone on my personal Mount Rushmore.
Elsewhere in today’s paper,
I’ve written a feature on another board game. Sports Action Canadian Pro Football was (and is) a Cfl-based simulation that’s earned rave reviews for its playability and realism.
Sports-themed board games don’t stop there: You can play a yachting board game, if you wish, or boxing, or basketball, or horse racing. Some are better (or worse) than others.
Terry Appleby, who made that CFL game, also made a hockey simulation that he doesn’t think was as good. He talked about how it’s easier to recreate stop-start games, like baseball and football, than sports with a more continuous flow.
“You get a fractioned shot of the game as it goes on, and that’s kind of how you have to design it,” he said of those more difficult sports.
“But it’s all good and fun.”
And good fun it is.
If you want to be a jockey but weigh 200 pounds, and are looking for something to while away your pandemic hours, find a copy of “Win, Place and Show” by Avalon Hill. If you have wimpy arms but your inner self wants to throw uppercuts at a fearsome opponent, “Title Bout” scratches that itch.
Playing a game immerses you in the sport its cardboard-and plastic trinkets represent. Does the concept of a summer without CFL football have you down? There’s an outlet for that, on a board.
You can download Cody Fajardo’s 2019 card (thanks, Garth!), and reunite him with his teammates for a fresh crack at the Grey Cup — you as the coach, instead of Craig Dickenson, but that’s kind of the point.
Miss baseball like crazy? A lot of people and companies have made a lot of board games with that exact theme: Some generic, some based on real-life player stats, some mediocre, some fantastic.
And if you want to indulge your hyper-geek side, keep a running set of stats on the side, logging each player’s at-bats or innings pitched.
A few pandemic-stricken sports leagues, including the
NBA and NASCAR, have had their athletes compete in online simulations recently for the edification of the viewing public.
But as we move through social isolation, don’t forget the immersive, card-clutching, dice-throwing world of sports-themed board games.
Not as glitzy as an Xbox, perhaps, but for my tastes, a darned sight more satisfying.