Waxpack

Every player is a baseball card. The back of the card is a spinner disc: home run, triple, double, single, walk, strikeout, groundout, flyout, and whatever else their quirks have added. An at-bat is one spin. The disc is the probability, so you can read a hitter's home run chance as a slice of pie. The pitcher does not spin. A pitcher has a shadow, an arc that lies over part of your disc and turns anything under it into an out. The good ones have wide shadows. Land the needle on a boundary and both outcomes happen. An inning carries one running multiplier. It starts at x1 and heats by one on every play that is not an out, and every scoring play scores its runs times the heat. Outs never cool it. Three outs end it. The quota climbs from 31 runs in the first game of a Wax Box season to 192 in the twentieth. A harder box or a higher stake raises it. The back half of a season wants an inning that gets away from everybody. An inning like that is nine singles in a row, quirks setting each other off, and a counter that catches fire on its way past the number. Between games you are in the front office. You sign a player out of a three-card pack, grant quirks, reshape discs and reorder the lineup. Rivals come to the desk wanting one specific player, and they will not say why. The weather has opinions. The Commissioner issues a decree each season and means it. A boss pitcher arrives with a shaped shadow and a rule twist. Everyone you release, retire, trade or lose to a fire goes into the binder. The binder is the museum of your league's history, and it is the only thing that carries from one season to the next. - One spin an at-bat, on a disc you can see and reshape. - An inning's heat climbs and never cools, and so does the quota. - 199 quirks, coaches and mascots, and 167 of them can land on a player. - 27 weathers, 24 decrees, 17 boss pitchers and 13 rival teams. - 53 batter archetypes, and one generated player in fifty is three raccoons. - 128 events, rolled at innings and at-bats and reported deadpan. - 8 boxes to play out of and 5 stakes to play them at. - A binder of 13 pages and 38 achievements, and nothing is ever drawn from it. The demo is the Wax Box at Paper, for as many seasons as you like.