SO YOU SAW PEOPLE FLIPPING OUT ABOUT NIGHTMARE SPORTS ON TWITTER and you’re like, okay, what the heck?

what the heck is right. it doesn’t get less weird, but it does get more fun.

disclaimer: im tired and don’t feel like digging up a lot of links so some of this could be somewhat inaccurate.

BLASEBALL started a couple months ago, and it started out small. it was mostly of interest to statistics nerds and sports fans looking for something to poke at while regular baseball was cancelled. but then the ttrpg nerds found it, and some writers and game designers started noticing how interesting it was, and people started developing lore around the players, which attracted fanartists and ficcers, and now there’s a thriving discord community and an FAQ and a wiki and a score of twitter rp accounts, and the fandom is where the party’s really at, generating an astonishingly intricate meta/paranarrative in tandem with the core site.

but what IS blaseball? how do you play? how do you even get started?

well, the mechanics of the game are, on the face of it, very simple and kind of boring. this is because it’s not a baseball simulator, it’s a sports fan simulator. the actual ‘players’ are randomly generated entities with deranged names like jessica telephone and boyfriend monreal, and (somewhat) random playing stats. however, like real life, there are no mechanisms for fans to directly affect the players as they play their games against each other. the blaseball servers run all the math, while you sit back and watch.

the website is simple and mostly text-based. you, a splorts fan, bet on the outcome of games using coins, which can’t be bought with real world money (though if you run out you can beg the gods for a little more). there are 20 teams who play 99 games in a season, which runs from monday to friday, with playoffs on saturday. once you win enough coins, you can buy votes.

we—the fans—vote on sunday, and this is where it gets fun: the blessings and decrees we vote for affects the rules of the games for the following season. each season has thus been significantly more deranged than the one before.

decrees change the rules of play for everyone, while blessings confer singular advantages to players and teams. a decree might be ‘add a fifth base’, while a blessing could be ‘fireproof jacket that renders a player invulnerable to incineration by rogue umpires’.

blessing votes work like raffle tickets, so factions of fans that all vote to get a blessing for their team gain a statistical—but not guaranteed—advantage over other voters. this is good, because some teams have way more fans than others. everyone’s been hating on the crabs lately because they had a good season a week or two ago and a lot of fans.

however, heckling, trolling, and griefing fans of other teams is considered extremely against the spirit of blaseball, and is always shut down fast. everyone is here to have a good time, and the vast majority of fans enthusiastically adhere to ideals of good splortsmanship, collaboration, and mutual respect. we all desperately want to have a good time and get along with each other, and in my opinion we’re doing a darn good job of it.

back to history: the first decree after the first week opened the book of forbidden knowledge, letting us see a partial set of rules for the game of blaseball. it also released rogue umpires that sometimes incinerate players during games with ‘solar eclipse’ weather. the second decree introduced peanuts, as something you could buy and eat on the website, as well as a mysterious and somewhat malevolent peanut god, the ‘lots of birds’ weather, and peanut allergies in some players. season three’s decree to grant the players interviews led to the ‘idols’ mechanism, where you could chose a player to idolize and gain coins when they scored, and a ranked idols leaderboard that has kicked off an epic saga of defiance against the blaseball gods.

there’s a lot of lore. there’s been a lot of incinerations, peanuts shenanigans, human and taco sacrifices, and now we have a giant squid from some kind of nether dimension hanging around. season eight promises to be even crazier.

in the end, blaseball is a horror game, by the developers’ own admission. there’s chaos and ominous portents and puzzles we’ve repeatedly failed and a hell of a lot of incinerated players. it invites fans’ attempts to gain control or even understanding, but it doesn’t make it easy. it’s about having fun in the middle of confusion and fear and loss, and about making whatever meaning we can out of the chaos.

it’s blaseball. it’s pointless. it’s weird. it’s incredibly fun.

come and play.