Thu Oct 18, 2012 4:45 pm
The cards are not the super advanced cards, just the basic cards, so there is a degree of realism lost. The players tend to way overperform.
The game is a mystery card game. You are assigned one of 5 possible years for each player but you don't know which one it is. Each player has a wide range of good to bad seasons, so you have to actually study his performance to try to determine if he's worth keeping or not. You can trade players and when you do, the years will randomly shuffle to one of the 5 years (it could be the same bad one or it could be a new one).
This is what makes this game so good. It's like real baseball in that you can have a player underperforming and swap with another owner and all of a sudden he catches fire (ala Manny going to the Dodgers a few years back).
It also keeps you in the hunt at all times because if you are stuck with a bunch of bad seasons, there is value to other owners in those cards and they will want to take them off your hands in hopes of getting good years from them.
The game is set up as a rotisserie game, where the champion has accumulated the most points in the 10 roto categories (runs, rbis, homers, batting average, steals, wins, saves, strikeouts, era, whip). I personally don't like this so much, I prefer to make a winning team rather than chasing individual stats, but winning tends to go hand in hand with the roto stuff.
That's a quick summary, I'm sure others can add to it. The thing that I love so much is the idea of managing players based upon what they do, not based upon the percentages that are fixed. Trying to decide whether to wait out a slow start or move your top priced hitter, getting an amazing season out of a super cheap player who happens to have one good year out of 5 on his card, that sort of stuff.
