Baseball Highlights 2045: Super Deluxe Edition Review

Mike Fitzgerald has been known for years for great card games – the outstanding Wyatt Earp and the Mystery Rummy series in particular – but in Baseball Highlights 2045, this veteran designer has hit a grand slam. I don’t want to hear it if you don’t like baseball. I don’t either. But whether you know the lifetime RBIs of Dale Murphy and Rollie Fingers or not, this is an outstanding game with a very unique and unexpected sense of setting. But more significantly, this game offers loads of great sci-fi sports action that will thrill any fan of head-to-head card games. The drama, tension and that heroic triple play to save the last game of a World Series championship are universally appealing.

It’s old-time, sepia-toned baseball meets posthuman cybernetics, hence the titular suggestion that it is a recounting of a season almost 30 years from today. It seems that in the near future, baseball was in decline so the decision was made to bring in cyborg pitchers. That sounds like a great idea to me, but even better is that they had to do something to counter these bionic pitchers and their Magna Gloves so robotic batting machines were developed to put players on base. But plain ol’ human players still excel at fielding, and the tradition is that “natural” players take on the first and last names of classic baseball stars of times past- they are kind of the superstars of this game’s version of America’s pastime.

I love the attention to detail, how it puts this great design into a cool narrative context. But the whole “genre sports” thing isn’t necessarily new nor is this even the first robot baseball concept I’ve seen. The novel brilliance of this game is in how it handles its abstraction. When you play a game it isn’t necessarily a 1:1 simulation. What the game is attempting is to effectively represent the performance of a team and its players over a full game with only six card plays. It reminds me to some degree of the excellent (and woefully out of print) World Cup Game, wherein full games are represented by just a couple of cards per participant.

When it’s your turn to bat, you’ll play one of the six cards in your hand to an in-play spot on your mat. If it has an instant ability – something like a situationally triggered clutch hit or cancelling another player’s hits – that triggers immediately. Then (and this is where it gets a little confusing), the other player’s pending and un-canceled hits from their previous turn go off, moving runners rated at slow, average and fast around the bases and putting batters on base according to their single, double or triple. By the end of six plays (and one last chance top deck play for the visiting team), whoever has the most runs is the winner, of course. And this is high scoring baseball, thanks to all these machines playing it.

But that is not all. After a mini-game, as the rulebook calls it, you take all of the players you played and add up their values. These are spent to draft new players from a display of six. All of these are better than the rookies and veterans your team starts with, offering new abilities and different combinations of hits, abilities, runner speeds and other variables. When you pay for whoever you want for your team, you send an equivalent number of players back to the minor leagues so that you always have fifteen. So there is a touch of card drafting and deckbuilding as part of the design, and there is some nice strategy in choosing players to counter an opponent’s choices.

There are multiple ways to play but the standard two player game is where most will experience the game. In it, you play three games (with buy rounds following) before heading into the World Series best-of-seven contest. It’s great. But the four player season is even better, with more dynamism and variety between your developing team and three others. It’s entirely possible to play seasons with even more players if you purchase some of the expansion teams. But if you don’t have enough Baseball Highlights 2045 enthusiasts in your peer group to play these awesome - and quick – multiplayer tournaments, the solitaire game is excellent. It’s against a “dumb” AI, but it still manages to be challenging and compelling. The AI player gets a stack of 15 free agent players and you can give yourself however many pre-series buy rounds you want before taking on the World Series, the more you do the easier it gets. The AI just draws a player against you, and somehow it always seems to know when you have no fielding cards in your hand so that it can lay out a double homer on the last play…with bases loaded, of course.

It’s really a simple game and it only needs about a page of rules, but the rulebook as written can’t seem to accurately explain how the timing, sequencing and processing of the game works. Which is unfortunate because it obscures the accessibility and ease of play that is hiding behind a 10 page online FAQ. And those three things are extremely important because that is where all of the depth of the game lies.

The economy of design and how it leverages those things to create a compelling sports game is just spectacular. It has very little extraneous detail, yet it somehow captures the essence of baseball. The only really specific, chrome-y rule is the on deck option. With it, you can put one of your six cards into the batter’s circle before play. And then, you can play a card marked as a pinch hitter during the game to sub in your on deck player. It’s a minor thing, but I’ve seen it make the difference between victory and defeat many times as a player with a Clutch ability or a specific function against a player type (robot, cyborg or natural) steps up and surprises the other player with a game-winning play.

This is an outstanding game and the Super Deluxe edition from Eagle-Gryphon is the way to go as far as I am concerned. The base game is still complete and it’s really great (not to mention less expensive), but the Super Deluxe version comes with seven mini-expansions that I think all add a lot to the game- while also giving you almost limitless choices as to how to develop your team by drafting the free agents. I especially like the Rally Cap add-on, which gives players special abilities if they are ahead or behind on runs. Magna Glove is essential as well, as it brings in some superb fielders. I mixed all seven of the expansions into the base game on like day three of ownership and I haven’t looked back since. The only one that I felt was a bit in the wrong direction was Coaches, cards that give you a one-time special per game. It didn’t feel as integrated as the others. I wish that it came with more than four teams so that you could play more out of the box, but there’s plenty to enjoy even if you think you aren’t interested in the baseball subject matter.