The Spinner Game
Ethan Allen's All Star Baseball
The Spinner Game
After National Pastime, but before APBA, there was Ethan Allen’s game.
Many of you know this one as the “spinner game,” and for good reason. This game used circular player discs and a spinner to create results.
It’s also quite old.
It seems that Ethan Allen’s “All-Star Baseball Game” was originally created back in 1941.
In fact, the earliest mention I could find of this game comes from an Associated Press column in early September 1943:
The first “review” of this game comes from October 1941:
And this is the earliest advertisement I could find:
Now, if you’ve played the game before, you’ll recognize it right away. This is what the “cards” looked like:
The game board looked something like this:
You stuck the card underneath the spinner on top of the “at bat” sign and spun the spinner around. It would land on one of the numbers (in theory; my understanding is that it was pretty common for the spinner to get stuck in between two numbers).
You’d then consult the “key” to figure out what happened:
There were special rules, too, for stolen bases, squeeze plays, and so on:
Ethan Allen’s game was popular for decades. However, in the long run, its lack of a pitching system and the somewhat faulty spinner system wound up being major obstacles to its success.
In fact, one of Hal Richman’s motivations for creating early versions of Strat-O-Matic was the fact that the spinner game simply didn’t have any pitching system at all. And we’ll get to Richman and his legendary Strat-O-Matic system soon.
This truly was the game that started it all for me. My older sister bought it for me and I played it so much! I kept stats on index cards. I made an index card for each player and updated it after every game by erasing and re-writing the updated stats. I pretty sure I even kept them for pitchers even though I realized that pitchers didn’t matter. I feel like I remember having a Roger Clemens card. It’s fuzzy! Lol.
My sisters husband told me that since I liked that game so much I’d love a game called Strat O Matic. I always kept that name in the back of my head. After I finished college and got married and before the babies started coming, one of the first online searches I did was “Strat O Matic”. The rest is history. But it all goes back to this game!
Wikipedia says this about the game:
"All Star Baseball is a 1941 baseball board game designed by baseball player Ethan Allen.
The game, manufactured by Cadaco-Ellis, was the best-selling baseball board game of all time.
It has been honored as one of the fifty most influential American board games of all time."
Those are two pretty heady accolades. Although I'm not sure I believe either of them.