Daniel, interesting post. To answer your question in a word, "no."
I purchased the APBA Master Game hoping that it would add detail and texture to playing the game. I appreciated all the possibilities when I examined the boards. However, when I tried to play games, what I found was that it was a chore moving from board to board and rolling the dice several times to find out the result of plays. In your video you described it as "algebraic." Most of the effort had little to do with baseball or managing. It mostly involved the physical activities of rolling dice and flipping boards. Add to that the near impossibility of keeping stats in those days before the advent of the PC, I soon gave up the effort.
Finding and buying Diamond Mind Baseball in 1998 was a godsend. In my season replays, I use the original schedules and manage both teams. I only use the computer to make base running decisions other than stolen bases or hit and run plays. I set the lineups and pitching and pinch hitting decisions for both teams in all games. The DMB program computes the stats. It takes about a half-hour to play a normal game and 9 months to a year to complete a season. In addition, I use Jack Wood's upgraded play-by-play as well as Trilogy and the Indexer.
All of that provides the baseball realism, immersion and complexity that is lost (for me at least) in playing "complex" board games.
When I was a boy and then a young man I enjoyed the heavy lifting of the CD world. APBA and Strat mostly. But now I rather not play CD and enjoy the PC Sims. I admit I am late to the PC offerings but prefer them. I experimented with Strat about 15 yrs ago and absolutely could not finish one game. It seemed too easy, like cheating almost,
So I stopped. Fast forward to about a year ago and I’m a PC newbie. Strat, Dombrov, NPiii (thanks to your videos), Action PC, inside Pitch, and APBA for Windows. The fun is able to complete a game and I hope a season. CD now , for the most part, is a chore. Thanks for interesting content.
I think it depends on what a person's definitions of "fun" and "playing" are and how these are related to their engagement with the game. I guess one aspect of engagement is how many things or activities you do when playing the game. Many people enjoy all the things you do when playing a cards and dice game for example. Everything from filling out the lineup sheet to holding the cards in your hand to moving the tokens around the cardboard base paths to rolling the dice to looking up the results on charts to filling in the stats at the end of the game. All of this is part of the engagement that draws many people to the open, c and d games. While I enjoy c and d games, I prefer and spend most of my gaming time with PC sims. I find more PC games more 'fun", because in this context my idea of fun is being able to replay an entire season in a reasonable amount of time (using auto-sim for most of the games) and having pennant races with a slew of stats. I simply don't have the time to do this with a c and d game.
So, in the above context, I'm willing to be less engaged when playing PC games in order to have a greater fun factor. The fact that PC games have a closed engine doesn't really bother me too much. I'm not thrilled with the sim engine of OOTP, but I've had great results with both Action and Diamond Mind.
Daniel, interesting post. To answer your question in a word, "no."
I purchased the APBA Master Game hoping that it would add detail and texture to playing the game. I appreciated all the possibilities when I examined the boards. However, when I tried to play games, what I found was that it was a chore moving from board to board and rolling the dice several times to find out the result of plays. In your video you described it as "algebraic." Most of the effort had little to do with baseball or managing. It mostly involved the physical activities of rolling dice and flipping boards. Add to that the near impossibility of keeping stats in those days before the advent of the PC, I soon gave up the effort.
Finding and buying Diamond Mind Baseball in 1998 was a godsend. In my season replays, I use the original schedules and manage both teams. I only use the computer to make base running decisions other than stolen bases or hit and run plays. I set the lineups and pitching and pinch hitting decisions for both teams in all games. The DMB program computes the stats. It takes about a half-hour to play a normal game and 9 months to a year to complete a season. In addition, I use Jack Wood's upgraded play-by-play as well as Trilogy and the Indexer.
All of that provides the baseball realism, immersion and complexity that is lost (for me at least) in playing "complex" board games.
When I was a boy and then a young man I enjoyed the heavy lifting of the CD world. APBA and Strat mostly. But now I rather not play CD and enjoy the PC Sims. I admit I am late to the PC offerings but prefer them. I experimented with Strat about 15 yrs ago and absolutely could not finish one game. It seemed too easy, like cheating almost,
So I stopped. Fast forward to about a year ago and I’m a PC newbie. Strat, Dombrov, NPiii (thanks to your videos), Action PC, inside Pitch, and APBA for Windows. The fun is able to complete a game and I hope a season. CD now , for the most part, is a chore. Thanks for interesting content.
I think it depends on what a person's definitions of "fun" and "playing" are and how these are related to their engagement with the game. I guess one aspect of engagement is how many things or activities you do when playing the game. Many people enjoy all the things you do when playing a cards and dice game for example. Everything from filling out the lineup sheet to holding the cards in your hand to moving the tokens around the cardboard base paths to rolling the dice to looking up the results on charts to filling in the stats at the end of the game. All of this is part of the engagement that draws many people to the open, c and d games. While I enjoy c and d games, I prefer and spend most of my gaming time with PC sims. I find more PC games more 'fun", because in this context my idea of fun is being able to replay an entire season in a reasonable amount of time (using auto-sim for most of the games) and having pennant races with a slew of stats. I simply don't have the time to do this with a c and d game.
So, in the above context, I'm willing to be less engaged when playing PC games in order to have a greater fun factor. The fact that PC games have a closed engine doesn't really bother me too much. I'm not thrilled with the sim engine of OOTP, but I've had great results with both Action and Diamond Mind.