Base price: $XX.
1 – 6 players.
Play time: 45 – 90 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Bat Flip Dynasty was provided by Scorelander Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
A lot of my Kickstarter Commitments are from a while ago, which is still pretty fun. Always nice to be surprised by “oh, yes, right; I need to dig deep on this one before the campaign”. I’m in kind of an odd spot, right now, so it’s been very hard to agree to upcoming campaigns (I hopefully will have more bandwidth to talk about why that is in… maybe a year or two). This just means if you’re waiting on something from me, I appreciate your patience. It’s been a weird week. Anyways, while I watch some TV I’m going to edit photos and wrap up this review, so let’s dive into Bat Flip Dynasty!
In Bat Flip Dynasty, you’ve decided that just winning a season is paltry. Winning a few years? Too easy. Making a dynasty that spans the test of time like one of those Sid Meier games? That sounds more right. Sid Meier’s Baseball; that’s what you’re going to do. Building up a dynasty isn’t as easy as you’d like it to be, though. You can’t just focus on one season or one player or one playoff; you have to really think how is your team going to be set up for three or four years and weave that into something profitable and maybe even have a little bit of fun along the way. So manage some contracts, figure some things out, and maybe even play some baseball!
Contents
Setup
Actually pretty low setup. Shuffle the Teams / Managers cards and deal each player two:
They’ll keep one on the Team side and one on the Manager side; their pick. Shuffle the players and deal each player 6. You can set aside the trophies which hopefully won’t still be this weird flesh color in the full release:
Set the dice aside:
Each player should take money equal to their team’s starting money, and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
This part’s a bit involved, but not too bad. Over the course of a few Seasons, you’re going to draft teams, play some baseball, and see if you can earn Trophies. The player who reaches a certain number of Trophies (based on player count) first wins!
To start, players draft … players. Ideally, you want all the players in your roster to have different positions, but that’s not a hard requirement. When you choose a player, you can keep them or discard them. If they’re a Prospect, they go to the left side of your play area to be bumped out of the Minor Leagues later. Otherwise, all players choose and play simultaneously and then place the player’s salary on their card.
Once that’s done, players roll the Team Dice! Each player has 0 or more blue Team Dice icons on their card; take the number for your team and roll them and attempt to place them. You don’t have to match the icons on the cards, but you’ll get more points if you do! If you place any dice on your Manager Card, that icon is considered wild and can be turned to any other dice face this round (other dice, not this one).
After finishing up the Team Dice, you play with the League Dice! This works a bit different. Total up how many red dice each player generates and then pool all those dice. The player who contributed the most gets to roll the dice and gets first pick, then play continues as a draft. If you cannot place a die, you must discard it.
Then total up wins! Each player with filled dice slots generates either Base Wins (small number) if the dice faces don’t match the dice faces on their card or Max Wins (big number) if they do. Note that each position (Catcher / Shortstop / Center Fielder, things like that) can only be scored once.
- If you gain at least 16 Wins, you get a Trophy!
- The player with the most Wins gets a Trophy!
Note that this means multiple players might get Trophies at this stage. That’s fine. Playoffs happen next, and those work a little differently. Take all the dice off of your players (not your Manager) and every player rolls theirs. Report how many pairs (1 point), triples (3 points), four-of-a-kinds (6 points), and five-of-a-kinds (10 points) you have to the table. You can then choose some number of dice to reroll (between one and all), and you can reroll twice, reporting each time. After two rerolls, the player with the most wins wins the Playoffs (and a Trophy with it)!
Then, it’s time for Arbitration. If you want to get rid of a player, discard them and take their Salary back into your pool (note that you don’t get more money). For all players you keep, add 1M from your money pool to them. Note that if you can’t afford the salary increase, away that player goes! Also note that you must have enough open slots to promote your Prospects up to your Active Roster (they don’t cost anything, though, which is nice [at least until next Season]). If you got fewer than 16 Wins this Season, any dice on your Manager are returned to you as Team Dice for next round. So that’s nice.
Continue this cycle of seasons until one player gets enough Trophies:
- 2 players: 8 Trophies
- 3 / 4 players: 7 Trophies
- 5 / 6 players: 6 Trophies
The first player to hit that trophy count wins!
Player Count Differences
A few things obviously get increasingly contentious as player count increases. For one, you’re unlikely to see some of the cards in your draft again, so you can’t play the two-player drafting trick of hoping your opponent won’t take a card you want so you’ll see it again later. That said, I think … Hokkaido (?) had one of my favorite two-player variant rules: there, you draw twice as many cards at two players, and then each player takes one and throws one away during their draft to keep that variety fresh. I wish more games did that. But, similarly, the Regular Season and Playoff Trophies are a bit harder to get with more folks in play. That’s why the win requirements are lower, granted, but it also undoubtedly means that the game will take longer with more people. Keep that in mind, I suppose, but Bat Flip Dynasty is plenty fun with two, so that’s probably where I’ll most commonly stick it out.
Strategy
- Don’t be precious about your team. You’re gonna have to dump some or all of them eventually (except for the players who skip Arbitration, I suppose). Don’t worry too much; they’ll be going to a beautiful farm upstate where they can run and play baseball and there are no hit batters ever again. In all seriousness, though, you need to make sure your overall strategy can stay flexible as you shift players in and out. Failure to do so means you’re going to have a bum Season or two, and you can’t win the game like that.
- Lean into your team’s ability; that’s a pretty constant source of Wins. Players come and go, but if you’re doing what your Team and Manager want, you’ll be able to keep some sense of constancy. It’s worth figuring out how to do that each Season so that you have a base to build off of.
- Don’t just take a player’s ability into consideration! You need to see how many dice they’ll earn you. If you have players with great abilities and no Team Dice across the board (did this once), you might have a lot of cool options to use your dice on but you’ll have no dice to use. So that’s not very fun.
- Earning a ton of League Dice is cool and all, unless you’re the only one doing it. I call this “the Freeloader”. Players with fewer League Dice aren’t banned from the draft; they just don’t get to go first. If I bring five and you bring one, we both get three. That’s awesome for you and garbage for me. Keep an eye on your opponent’s drafted players before you lean too much into League Dice returns.
- You really can only have a super-expensive player for a bit before it messes you up. They just keep getting pricier, usually, though there are players that can lower their initial price or remove money from them. Either way, that’s usually pretty good if the ability is good.
- Keep an eye on wild dice faces; they can make the League Dice draft tilt in your favor. Some Managers give that as an ability, but you can force one die face (or two sometimes) to be wild by placing those dice on your Manager Card. That can be pretty helpful with a weird roll or to prep for the League Dice Draft (since then you can take those).
- Similarly, if you’re not going to be able to match dice faces on your cards, at least draft dice your opponent needs. If you see another player doing the thing I just said, try to take those dice so that they can’t rely on wild faces to push for Max Wins instead of Base Wins. Or if they benefit from certain dice faces (some players give Wins for this), take those. Don’t just leave them around if you’re not going to be able to hit Max Wins on a player anyways.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Once again, some pretty nice art and pun work in this game, which I always like to see. The players and teams look great, the colors are bright and bold and engaging, and a lot of the puns are deeply stupid, just how I like them. I love that kind of stuff; it gives player the opportunity to make a specific card their favorite for no reason and just really lean into the pun or the design, in a kind of baseball trading cards way.
- All of the different teams have themes and the players for those teams have abilities that fit that theme to some degree. It reminds me of Millennium Blades and trying to make things work. Obviously it’s nicest if you have all members of the same team, but figuring out how different aspects of different teams play off of each other is really fun.
- The game has a good flow once you get into it. It’s largely drafting and dice placement; you’re either doing one, the other, or both.
- I like the legacy-esque element of the game where you’re strongly encouraged to change your strategy every Season or so rather than just doing the same thing over and over. I just think that’s interesting. It forces the metagame of the game to evolve over time as players work around some of their strategies starting to deliver diminishing returns. It also forces players to think rather than just react or phone it in, so there’s a lot of player engagement during each round. Again, always nice to see.
- It’s very baseball, if you’re into that. I mean, I could probably trick my dad into playing this with me just based on how baseball it is.
- The Playoffs, mechanically, are weird and I’m still kind of into it. It manages to capture the thing everyone loves about the playoffs, which is that the best team will probably win but still, anything could happen. Keeps things fun and interesting.
- More generally, I think Trophies are allocated at the right frequency and fairly. No idea how 16 got picked as the number of wins required for a Trophy, but I always like to call those Playtesting Numbers: a number that feels like it got workshopped, regardless of whether or not it actually was. It’s a good time.
Mehs
- There are just enough cards that shuffling them all at once is hard based on my hand size. I wonder if that’s true for everyone? I think I have reasonably-sized hands, though this isn’t really the place I want to legislate this aspect (or any aspect, really) of my body. It’s just a tall stack of player cards. On one hand, you’re getting a lot of cards; have fun. On the other, a deck that’s hard to shuffle can make your first few plays a bit weird if you’re not being thorough.
- The trophies are an odd color (in the prototype). This isn’t a real critique because, as a matter of policy, I try not to Actually Criticize things about a game that may not make it to the final version. I’m just saying they’re uncomfortably flesh-toned and it makes me laugh in a deeply uneasy way.
Cons
- This can be a long game with enough players. I think BGG has it as a “45 – 90m” game, which … that’s a tough time range. It’s a long lunch or a “you’re going to get in trouble with your manager” long lunch, depending on how many people you have. I suppose it could stand to be tighter, in that regard.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
This kind of always makes me laugh. So, when I first heard about Bat Flip (the original game), I essentially said “well, how much fun could I have with a game that’s thoroughly about baseball?” and I ended up being rather impressed. This time around, I said to myself “well, I’ll give it another shot, but again, there can only be so much fun to be had with a theme I’m relatively indifferent to”, and, well, he got me again! Bat Flip Dynasty is an impressive and entertaining game with some nice strategy, good combo synergy, and a lot of dice rolling, which, is half of what makes a game fun. I particularly like to point out for these that enjoying the theme means you’ll likely love the game, but even if you don’t enjoy the theme (I just … can’t get that into baseball), the game is still a lot of fun! There’s a lot of fun to be had in making your own teams, even if it’s just based off of vibes or how much you like the name puns, and even within that Millennium Blades-style mess of a ton of random cards are some pretty obvious and easy-to-master synergies, making the game still pretty approachable for a lot of players. I even like the legacy-esque elements where your players gradually become more expensive over time, meaning you can’t just stick to one strategy and ride it out through the game. You have to change things up and change them up relatively frequently if you want to win. Lots of avenues to that for a card game; I was pleasantly surprised at how robust the game was. If you’re a fan of baseball and have always wanted to manage your own team, you enjoy synergies and card combos, or you just like rolling a bunch of dice and placing them to score points, I’d definitely recommend checking out Bat Flip Dynasty! It’s a solid one.
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