National Pastime

Historically important tabletop baseball simulation game, recognized as the precursor to the highly successful APBA series. Players of the game select lineups of cards, each card representing an actual major league baseball player. The sequence of play consists of a series of plate appearances as if playing a game of baseball. Each plate appearance is resolved by: (1) rolling two dice, (2) reading a number code from the batter's card based on the roll, and (3) looking up the number code on a chart corresponding to the current distribution of runners on base to determine the result of the plate appearance. The designer, Clifford Van Beek, was granted a U.S. patent for the game system in 1925 (#1536639), though the game was not published until 1930. The game was apparently only published once, with 18 cards for each of the 16 teams then competing in the major leagues. A recreated version of the game was published in 2003 by a company called Sports Game Publishing.