A downloadable game.
They Came To Play Ball is a really fun and imaginative game that truly captures what it means to be an Antiball player on Athabasus Station. Really takes me back to when I would sit in front of our video-graph and root for my favorite team (Go Roughnecks!) and see Amit the Forever Forward go for the net with such ferocity, never giving up!! If you're looking to really capture what it means to play the high stakes drama and passion that goes into Antiball, this one here is THE game for you!
They Came To Play Ball is an excellent Firebrands game, Adira Slattery really knows this framework and shows her prowess here. Small additions like having tokens that are bid and lost and gained throughout are really welcome to the formula that's easy to manage and understand, a great extrapolation if you've played The King is Dead! It plays on the field of being a fast and fun sports team/culture game with it's raucous Antiball Matches to it's Press Releases and also a still beautifully intimate game of growing rivals and relationships that bloom on and off the field. In the game I played I was just as excited to have been called for dinner by the star of an opposing Hellions as playing the game itself!
And all of this is to say nothing on just how wonderful the setting is, and how dripping in evocative juices you want to extrapolate on. The Eldritch Sci-Fi aesthetic is so wonderful, mixing what could be drab and horrific with bombastic and ritualistic. It's truly wonderful. Antiball itself is pretty amorphous and based on several real sports so you can really let yourself go wild even if you aren't a "sports fan." I grew up in Jersey where you can't not have opinions on Football even if you don't know anything but the teams, I will always be a die hard Giants fan, and They Came To Play Ball lets me be passionate about what I love about sports, the idea of them!
This game was released during the explosion of Blaseball, but I got to play it a few months ago and when blaseball started my immediate thought was "OH SHIT IT'S JUST THEY CAME TO PLAY BALL!!!" so if you're here because of that, this is the game for you and your friends. You won't regret it!
