Baseball Card GM Review - Deck Construction & Auto Battler Using Real Baseball Cards!

0:01 Hello my friends. Right now as this video is going live, we're right in the middle of the Major League Baseball World Series. So I thought it'd be fun to review a baseball game. Today we're taking a look at Baseball Card GM or General Manager. In this game, it's very different from other games that you may have played. This is sort of blends sort of collectible card game style deck construction or drafting with some auto battling. Uh it's very different. Let me show you how you play and I'll see you on the other side.

0:34 Before I get to the moment you've been waiting for, I wanted to tell you about the sell trade program at Noble Knight Games. Now, as gamers, we all have games that are cluttering our shelves that we either don't have the right group for or might even not like it. Well, now you can turn those unappreciated games into cash or store credit. Noble Knight Games buys thousands of games and gaming products. It's easy to send them a list of the games that you'd like to sell or trade. Now, they'll send you a quote and even pay for the shipping of the games. Get treated and paid like royalty while you sit back and collect cash or store credit. To get started, click the link in the description of this video or in that upper right corner there, and then click the sell trade button. In baseball card GM, you're going to be drafting or constructing your team of real baseball cards like Dwight Gooden, Roger Clemens, Tony Gwyn, Cotton Fisk, Mark Magguire, and anyone that you can go get out in the market.

1:32 And you'll be using the stats on the backs of these. Now, there's different ways to play the game. There's some easy ways where you can just use the most recent years of stats, so you have to keep track of which year you're using for each player. Uh but or you can sometimes use the best stat uh of any year, whichever one it is, like RBI's, hits, things like that. Um but you're gonna be using these stats to both draft your team, pick your team, and then actually use them in the game. Now, there's tons of different ways to build your team. You can go out and just construct your best team that you want to do. Or you could do some drafts where you buy a bunch of cards or you pull together a bunch of cards and you then draft with them. And you could do it either, there's lots of ways that you can draft. One of them is by position. So, like here we have a bunch of second baseman and we put, you know, a handful out there and then each of us go back and forth drafting, you know, two of them, for example. Uh, and so that's a way you could do it. You could do it by, you know, having a deck of cards of baseball cards and drawing the top three, picking one, discarding the other ones, go through the deck, and then give your discard pod to the other player.

2:28 There's lots of different ways that you can draft. There are is a drafting method uh sort of sheet that you can use. Uh, you can also uh that comes with the game. It kind of shows you the different ways to draft, but you could also do sealed where you could buy sealed packs and then open those up and just draft them. So, there's tons of different ways that you could build your team. Now, once you've built your team, you're going to build your lineup. And so, here where the home team has your lineup from one through nine. And again, you have one of each player, uh, one of each position. Outfield, you can have any three outfielders. You have a designated hitter. And you set up your lineup. And that's going to be how you want it. The fast people up first, the cleanup players, all that. You're using all baseball knowledge to build your lineup. the visitors players doing the same. I have their cards facing me, but normally they'd be facing the other player. You're also going to have pitches. So, it's like Dwight Gooden versus Red Sox. It's like the 86 World Series all over again. Uh, and then we got, you know, the bullpen. So, you got a bunch of relievers and you got a bench players, a bunch of bench players that you can substitute in for pinch runners and pinch hitters and things like that.

3:20 Now, there's a scoreboard. You're going to track the top and the bottoms of the innings. You're going to track the scores. You're going to track the outs using this board here all on this neoprene map. How the game works. You can play a whole game in 30 minutes. So, let's say, let's say it's the bottom of the first, Lenny Daxter is up. You flip it over and you roll the dice. So, let's say I rolled a 23. This is going to be under average because it says 23 here. And it says if he's less than 250 batting average, he grounds out. If it's more than 250, he gets a single. Now, let's say say we were using his most recent stat year. Here we go batting average. It was 295 285. Sorry. It's im it. So, it is greater than 250. So, he's going to get a single. So, we take him, put him on first base. There we go. Then we go to the next batter, Tim Reigns. You can steal. Many dice are fast. And depending on stealing bases, depending on how many bases they stole, you can decide to steal and roll a die. For example, he had 27 stolen bases. So between 20 and 49, if you roll one, two, three, or four, so that's basically, you know, four out of six chances you could steal.

4:17 Otherwise, he's out and then you you keep going. So maybe we maybe we don't do that. Maybe maybe we go with Tim Reigns. And so that's basically how the game is played. Now, there's some specifics about stuff like groundouts, uh, a force, a runner, and a double play. So that makes sense. If it's forced runner, it's a double play. So you don't want ground outs with a a forced runner. Uh flyyous, they advance the lead runner from second or third or from third to home. And on base runners may advance go an extra base if they have more than 10 steels or if there are two outs. So having fast runners are good for that as well. Now in your first game or two, you don't have to play with pitchers, but if you do uh a couple games in and you have a star pitcher, means a star pitcher has a RA of 2.25 25 or less has 16 or more wins or had 36 or more saves, then they're a star pitcher.

5:03 And then if it's lefty versus righty or righty versus lefty, they would add a certain amount. If it's a lefty versus lefty, righty versus righty, it adds 10. So, for example, if you rolled a a 26 here, uh normally you would need uh 50 or greater to walk, but if it's a lefty versus lefty, righty versus righty, you need you'd need a 60 or greater or 55 if it's a lefty versus righty. So, make that star picture makes it harder. But depending on the innings pitched that that player actually played, they can they can only pitch a certain amount of innings throughout the game. Uh, for example, here, if you pitch less than 120 innings, max one innings. So, it's going to be like lots of closers and stuff. Whereas starters, if you pitch 240 or more, you got to do eight innings. So, you're always going to have to have one pitcher change at least each game. Uh, but there that's pretty much the general idea of the game. So, essentially, you're playing baseball.

5:52 Again, it takes only 30 minutes. You're sort of simulating this, but you're making all the changes. You're making lineup changes. You're making pinch hitters. You're making pinch runners. Uh that's why you're using your bench. You're relieving pitchers. You're making all the major decisions in the game as well as the main ones of constructing your team and constructing your lineup, especially based upon, you know, who you're playing, what you're playing against. In a in a nutshell, it's the high low how you play baseball card, general manager. Before I get to the moment you've been waiting for, I wanted to let you know that Game Toppers is giving 15% off premium game mats and accessories, specifically to my US and Canada audience using code game boygeeek 15 off for a limited time only. Hear more about this at the end of my final thoughts. All right, I want to preface this by saying this game is designed by an eight-year-old and uh quite honestly and it's blown my mind. This uh this gentleman I'm going to save his name because I don't know if he wants me to say it. uh keep his security there, but uh he's [clears throat] done an amazing job. He is a baseball nerd. I have gone back and forth with the publisher on questions I had about the games and certain things and some questions about the math and this and that. Uh and we've gone back and forth and just hearing the types of things that his son has done to make this game and studying baseball cards and they just want to be able to play a game with baseball cards. It's an amazing feat of what this 8-year-old has done. Uh first of all, the thing I love about this is the nostalgia. It really brings out the baseball nerd kid in me.

7:15 I feel like a child. I feel like I'm back at 10 years old again. I used to play Status Pro baseball with all my neighborhood kids all winter long when we couldn't go outside and play real baseball because it was too cold back east in the East Coast. And uh we were always playing those things. It was about stats and players and this and that. And this kind of brings that childhood memory back. So, it's a lot of nostalgia for me with this, especially with the baseball cards. Uh now, this essentially is a collectible card game or trading card game, TCG style game with baseball cards. And I think that is an absolutely brilliant idea cuz there's so many popular games out there like Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon and stuff like that that use collectible card games. They have their own market and prices for cards. And here it's like this 8-year-old is like, "Let's take baseball cards and make a CCG with it." Like, it's unbelievable.

8:04 What a great idea. I like that. It's essentially an auto battler with influence. Now, if this game had come out a few years ago, I think it would have gotten a lot of flack of what you just you pick your team and you just roll dice. But, you know, a few years ago, Challengers came out and this game took the world by storm. It won the Kenfield Desar, which is like the Connoisseurs game of the year in Germany. It it was very popular. It was an auto battle game where you're just like selecting cards and then you don't even get to decide what to do with those cards. You shuffle your deck and essentially it's the game war. you just flip over a card and see if you beat the other player. But it was super popular and another auto battle. And since then, because of that popularity, many auto battles have come out since. This year, tag team came out. It's an auto battle about combat where you get to, you know, select a card, but then you get to decide where to put it. This game has even more agency than both of those because not only are you drafting or selecting your team and constructing your deck, you're selecting your lineup of where they go. So, it already covers both the best of both worlds of those other two games. But then during the game, you have all sorts of decisions.

9:09 When to steal or not, when to pinch hit or not, when to pull your pitcher or not, all these other different decisions that you're making. So, it is an auto battler, but it has more agency than some of the other ones. I love that there's many different ways to draft. You can you can create your team by just going out and buying some of the the cards you want. Uh I actually didn't even have any baseball cards. I had them as a kid, did not have them recently. I had to go out and buy them. There's like, you know, I bought like a a 300 card set packed. They they were closed. They were sealed from the 80s and 90s on Amazon for like 30 bucks. 300 cards. And I went through and did that. And then I ended up buying my 86 Red Sox team and the 01 Diamondbacks team. Uh, and so I've been kind of playing with those, too. But there's different ways to draft. So, you can go out and buy your own cards and make your own lineup. Or my favorite way to play is to have a sealed draft where you open up the cards and then like you're doing drafting either by positions. That's one way to do it. Or you could just do there's many different ways of there's a a rule sheet that that tells you different ways that you can draft back and forth. That's fantastic. The way that that's my favorite way to play is just have a big pool of cards, figure out which ones you're going to use for the pool and then you draft back and forth. And that is just such a blast. It reminded me of a CCG of that I loved uh called Star Wars Destiny. It's no longer supported, but they had those things, you know, where you have the sealed drafts and stuff and I loved those things. One cool thing about this is games like Star Wars Destiny, which you can't buy new cards for anymore, which kind of stinks. You know that this is never going to happen to this game because it's baseball.

10:37 Baseball's going to be around forever. It's been around for hundreds of years. It's going to be around for for 100 years. It's going to be around for longer. So, these cards are always going to be coming out. There's always going to be new players. And it's that's the beauty of this. It's such a cool idea. I like the manager decisions. Hey, I'm gonna set my lineup up. I'm gonna put some fast people up front. I'm going to put my, you know, the the the cleanup guys in the RBI's in the the three, four, five slots, stuff like that. I'm going to have some fast runners for pinch runners. I'm going to have some some some situational players for for um on the bench. I am going to have lefty righty matchups which really matter, stuff like that. Um I like that there's different levels of play. You can start very simply, which is like, hey, just pick cards that you like the players of. Don't even look at the stats and just, you know, play with the the most recent um most recent stat year or even use the best stat of whatever you roll that turn for that player. It makes it easy to scan. You don't have to worry about a lot of strategy. And you can play it very lightly like this. Or you can play it very strategically where you're play playing with uh specific years for each player. You have a lineup card. That's another good thing. You have a lineup card that you can print out. One comes with the game, but you can print it out where you write down your lineup. You write down the year of the stat you're using. So you have to keep like remembering which one you do. Uh this was a new addition that happened as I was playing the game and I was asking him questions about certain things. And I like that you could start very simply but then you could go super deep which is like hey different stats for everybody. Pictures matter. Star pictures matter. They alter things. Um it's it's great. Now this is kind of like a simulation but it's kind of like a simulation light. It's not as

12:08 seriously a simulation as some real simulations out there but it's a ton of fun. If you like baseball, this is an absolutely no-brainer game to get for sure. Now, let's talk about the negatives. Well, you should know by now if this is for you. This game is a niche within a niche within a niche. It's baseball, it's collectible card game style things, and it's auto battler. So, it's like if you don't like all three of those things, if you don't like baseball, you're not going to like the game. It's just not going to be for you. If you like baseball, I'm not huge on CCGs, but I still loved the game because it was baseball cards, right? Uh, and I like auto battal. And so if you like any of those three things, or if you like all those three things, I think you're going to be in love with this game. If you like even two of those three things, like like I do, I think you're still going to love the game. But it is a niche within a niche. It's got a very small target market. Although there are tons of baseball fans out there, I think this would apply more or be more relevant to baseball fans that aren't necessarily board gamers than my audience, which is basically board gamers that maybe are normally not baseball fans. Who knows? Uh the other thing is you need baseball cards to play. They don't come with the game, but like I said, I went off and just, you know, for 15 to $30, you can get between 100 and 300 cards to play with. I mean, that's not terrible. Uh, and you'll get a lot of replayability with that with the way you draft and you don't use all the cards every game. Also, some cards might not have all the stats. One of the cards I got from Lenny D Lenny Dystra had no no triples. Spike Owen had no walks on their card. Sometimes you have to look up some stats. That's a negative, too. Uh, but overall, if you're looking to have a nostalgic

13:38 baseball feeling with real players and play with real baseball cards and feel like you're a kid again and have it be an auto battler, which is a popular style of game, but also pulls from like CCG style stuff. This is an amazing sort of concoction of different mechanisms. I am so impressed it's done by an eight-year-old. Great job. It's getting my highest honor. A saxophone serenade. Here we go.

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