We’ve been running different one-night tournament formats Tuesday nights at Logan Arcade, so what with Chicago having a bad case of WORLD SERIES FEVER, it was only natural that we’d run Pin-baseball at some point, right?
Actually, the idea just popped into my head this afternoon. I’m sure someone’s done a pin-baseball format before, but I didn’t Google it or anything (one of tonight’s players tells me it’s similar to a darts format). Attendance sucks tonight, but I’ve got about half a dozen people going at it anyway.
The rules so far:
9 tables - each one’s like an at bat
Each table has four goals - single, double, triple, home run. These should be linear in nature - for instance, on Ghostbusters it’s 20-40-60-80 ghosts captured; on White Water it’s 25M - 50M - 100M - 200M.
It’s all about advancing your runners to score runs, just like actual baseball. Runners advance the same number of bases as the hit - so if you get a double on your first game, and a single on the next, you have runners on first and third to try to knock in on your next table.
Tiebreaker is hits - lower number wins.
That’s pretty much it so far! Has anyone else played a baseball pinball format? I’m curious what’s already been done!
We ran a baseball-style fun event several years ago that turned out well. It was a team event - players were divided into two teams at the beginning. Play alternated between the two teams as in baseball, with each person playing a 1-ball game as their at-bat, and with 4 score tiers to represent single, double, triple, and home run. Failure to reach the single score tier, or a tilt regardless of score, resulted in an out.
The opposing team chose the game you played (the “pitcher”) and could substitute at any time (and once substituted, a game could not return).
The major downside was that only one person was playing at a time, so there was a lot of watching, but we encouraged coaching and trash talk so it was entertaining.
The “pitcher” should play one ball to set the score threshold. < threshold= out. 100% = single. 125%= double ect… Prolly want to enact a timer though such as 60 seconds max ball time.
So, the results: high score was 8R on 9H, low score was 5R 5H. Everybody seemed to like the idea and the way it was run, but we only had seven people so the amount of score clustering is kinda an issue. Maybe we should change the way we apportion the goals? I’ll update the thread if we run the format again!
Seems like this could work well in heads-up play, but it might be tricky to balance in group play.
A derivative team format could also be interesting – P1 is the pitcher from team A, P2/3/4 are the batters for Team B, with a similar percentage based scoring structure.