It’s The Best Time to Get Into Blaseball There’s Ever Been
Blaseball. You know, that virtual baseball league? The one with the players with names like Jaylen Hotdogfingers and Peanut Bong. And teams like the Kansas City Breath Mints and Charleston Shoe Thieves. The game where, at the end of every season, fans vote to make permanent changes to the world and its rules. And where players can get incinerated, swept off the pitch by cosmic flooding, eaten by sharks, or stuck in an enormous peanut shell.
Named one of the top 10 games of 2020 by Polygon, Vulture, and the LA Times, Blaseball is described by its developers, The Game Band, as a cultural event, a horror game, and a gift to us, the fans. It’s a free browser game that’s equal parts sport simulation, team community building exercise, strategy game, absurdist comedy, societal critique, and cosmic nightmare. And it’s brilliant.
If you’ve ever been tempted by the sound of Blaseball, ever thought it might be kind of neat but found yourself put off by its complexity, even if you’ve tried it before and bounced off, now is the time to give it a go.
Until now, unless you’ve been with the game from the very beginning, Blaseball’s biggest weakness has been just how darn complicated the whole thing is. With 24 teams, two leagues, four divisions, hundreds of players, each with 12 or so fingers, unlimited tacos, seasons’ worth of history, peanuts and red herrings, snack slots and betting and weather and gods… It’s all incredible, but wow it’s a lot to take in at first.
Luckily, Blaseball is simplifying. The last few seasons told a story of deliberate overcomplication, resulting in a Blaseball apocalypse, the end of the game’s first chapter, and a fresh start. We’re now in the uncharted territory of the Gamma, putting new and old fans alike on an even playing field. So if you’re at all interested, now is the best time to get in on the ground floor of whatever Blaseball 2.0 is going to look like.
So how did we get here? Well. Blaseball has had two major eras: the Discipline Era, ushered in after the very first season when fans voted to Open the Forbidden Book, ended when the cruel peanut god the Shelled One was defeated on the diamond. The Expansion Era, presided over by the Blaseball god of commerce, involved rapid expansion and mysteries from the past as fans raced to figure out the fate of the previous league before history could repeat itself.
The final few days of the Expansion Era saw entire teams incinerated, while others escaped the carnage in ships, attempting to navigate to the domains of the last four Blaseball gods — the Vault, home to the league’s most iconic players and ruled by Lootcrates the league historian; the Hall, housing all deceased players and cared for by the Monitor, a beleaguered cosmic squid; the Desert, apparently literally a desert (?) and domain of the Reader, a mysterious tarot entity; and the Horizon, which could also just be a black hole, we don’t really know.
And it’s that Black Hole that’s been simplifying the game. As the season continued, it began to swallow teams but also rules, slowly eating away at all the complications Blaseball has been acquiring since the very first season. What shape the league will be in when play resumes, we have no idea, but we can at least be certain that this apocalypse has meant the game will be returning with a clean slate, ready for new stories. In short, it’s at its easiest to get into since its launch.
We also don’t know when Blaseball will be coming back— the game is currently in a siesta, and The Game Band has yet to indicate when that break will end. But the Blaseball wiki is alive and well, as is the community online — on Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and especially Discord — so if you think you’re even a little bit interested, take a look around, check out the teams, and get hype for the game’s new start.
Rejoice! Play ball.
