About once every week or two, someone tags me in a Discord channel or on Twitter because someone, somewhere has asked the question: "What is Blaseball?"
There are many answers to this question, ranging from the very simple to the Charlie-from-Always-Sunny-explaining-Pepe-Silvia complex. I imagine I'm getting tagged in these things because multiple times a week, I yell something on Twitter about how cool my favorite Blaseball team (the Kansas City Breath Mints, who are having a...difficult season) is.
One way to answer is to try and tell the story of what's happened in Blaseball so far is through an "official, league-sanctioned recap of the major events of The Discipline Era in the first ever Blaseball Roundup, Presented by the Internet League Blaseball Broadcasting Committee, a subsidiary of Internet League Blaseball." Thankfully, we have one of those for you:
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/10/blaseball-seasons-1-11-official-league-sanctioned-recap"]
But perhaps a better explanation for the total Blaseball novice is this succinct outline from one of the members of developer The Game Band, Sam Rosenthal:
"Blaseball is an absurdist hard take on fantasy baseball," he says in an interview with IGN. "It's kind of like fantasy baseball, [but] with more fantasy [and] tabletop role playing game dynamics. You are placing fake bets on fake teams that play 24 hours a day. And you're earning coins by placing these bets. And you're using that currency to buy a bunch of different things.
"But one of the main things that you buy are votes, which can be used every single week in our election. And we have different things up for vote that can change the course of the league and your team forever. So every single week, community organizers figure out where they want to take the game next. And that's really the core fun part about Blaseball -- no individual choice makes a big difference. But collectively, the fans coming together, it can completely change the entire way the story unfolds."
Okay, but, what IS Blaseball? Like really?
To expand on Rosenthal’s explanation, Blaseball is a primarily-text based, massively multiplayer baseball management game played in your PC browser and is, for the most part, being played at all times. It's entirely free and all the money is fake; you just sign up, pick a team, and get betting. A "season" lasts a week and consists of 99 games played on the hour, every hour, Monday through Friday, with eight teams advancing to the post-season on Saturday and a winner being crowned at the end of that. On Sunday, votes are tallied, consequences meted out, and new rules ranging in absurdity from adding a fifth base to redistributing the best players from the best teams are established before a new season begins again on Monday. Fans engage, as Rosenthal said, through bets and votes, but also by picking a favorite team -- such as the Canada Moist Talkers, the Chicago Firefighters, the New York Millennials, the Ohio Worms, or you know, the Breath Mints! -- and cheering them on, as well as voting each week on buffs like arm cannons and extra limbs to help them out.
Blaseball began in the summer of last year and went through eleven seasons in 2020, broken up by occasional "siestas", where play was paused so The Game Band could catch up with development as the game's popularity grew. If you’re totally unaware of Blaseball, the above might just sound charmingly strange, but things get weird along the way. Over the course of those eleven seasons, a story unfolded: forbidden knowledge was accessed, players were incinerated by rogue umpires, the dead were revived, and all of Blaseball banded together to fight against a giant peanut god that threatened to destroy everything. The fans and players won, and Blaseball took a longer hiatus signalling the end of "The Discipline Era."
But now, as Blaseball transitions into a new Era, The Game Band wants to address a pressing issue: Though Blaseball is, at its core, pretty simple -- just betting on fake sports games and voting on new sports rules -- the lore and fan communities around the game have grown to be so sprawling and involved that anyone curiously peeking into the fandom might be immediately put off by how much seems to be required to understand Blaseball at all.
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"So much seems to have happened in Blaseball, but at the same time it's very much a 'live in the present' type of game," Rosenthal says. "And you can jump in at any time and pick a team to follow their story. It's very much like, if you have any experience getting into a new sport for the first time, there is so much history. Like, the Los Angeles Dodgers, right? You don't need to know what happened in 1986 [with that team] to be able to enjoy what's happening today with the Dodgers."
Stephen Bell, another one of The Game Band, adds, "What do people maybe need to know, to jump into the new era from what happened before? Basically, there was a baseball league, and then the fans voted to open the Forbidden Book. And then, like 11 seasons later, they killed God. There's stuff in between, but that's where we've left off."
A New Era
Now, Blaseball is back for The Expansion Era, and concluded Season 12 last week (congratulations to our champs: the Hades Tigers). The Expansion Era has brought with it a number of new features, including a Feed on the site to help fans keep up with what's happening on their team -- wins, losses (more losses if you're, sigh, a Breath Mints fan), roster changes, players disappearing to Elsewhere, incinerations, that kind of thing. Before, much of this information was only available after it immediately happened by checking the game's community Discord server or various dedicated Twitter accounts.
The Game Band still encourages fans who like what Blaseball has to offer to check out the official Discord, especially if they want to participate in the cultural event of Blaseball beyond simply betting and randomly voting. Every team has its own channels in the server, where fans congregate to help push certain votes, which ultimately results in collective action shaping Blaseball's narrative. To give a recent example, at the end of the last Season, the Kansas City Breath Mints collectively voted to buff our beloved batter Pudge Nakamoto. We then also inexplicably voted to kick him off our team in the same election. Community voting, however well-planned, is sometimes imperfect. Like with any sport, disappointment, too, is part of the joy of being a fan.
As another example, at the end of Season 11 fans voted on three Decrees that were enacted: Eat the Forbidden Book, Deface the Forbidden Book, and Close the Forbidden Book. Fans didn't know what the implications of those votes were at the time, but The Game Band tells me they had new features in mind for every possible voting choice on the table. The fans picking those three resulted in the addition of concessions, Wills (basically another way to vote to influence your team each week), and the construction of stadiums for each team -- an exciting endeavor that we're voting on currently without knowing what consequences voting on Prefab options like "Rodeo" or "Boreal" or "Twede" will bring.
"We treated that election like a writing prompt for this upcoming era," says The Game Band's Joel Clark. "That's what we've been working with for the past few months."
"I described it to someone the other day as, we have built a bunch of toys to play with," he continues. "And so while we have a lot of things planned out, we've planned out that possibility space, we may not know when things are going to go or when things are going to happen. Whether or not we're going to use a certain system or not, that sort of stuff will be improvisational. And we'll see what the community runs with. And we will bring out and play with our toys when the time is right."
Blaseball producer Felix Kramer adds, "Blaseball's like a cake. We have all the ingredients on the table. The fans are putting it in. And it might not be edible at the end!"