Cats Baseball

Genre: Board Game / Sports (Baseball)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Cats Baseball, released on Nintendo Switch in 2024, is a Board Game (or more specifically, a Dice Game) based on the Sport of Baseball, with players taking the role of one of various anime-style cat-people in a future dystopia where disputes and territory are settled through baseball games… represented by dice rolls.

While this odd and seemingly random combination of elements certainly makes Cats Baseball unique, it’s hard not to think this concept was dreamed up by tossing darts at a board rather than any coherent vision, and it shows in the way so little of what this game is attempting seems well thought-out.

I suppose the 2D anime cat characters look decent enough, though they’re not memorable, and apart from this there’s very little to look at in the game’s presentation, save for stylized text. Even the baseball elements are very subdued here, which seems odd when half of the gameplay is based on baseball. All of this is backed by energetic anime-inspired synthesized music, though again, there’s nothing memorable.

The game’s story is completely disposable, with little effort made to endear us to its characters or flesh out its world. It’s just an island nation with multiple Hunger Games-style districts each having a representative baseball champion compete for supremacy, with the protagonist looking to take over his district and then the nation for the good of its starving people. Everything here is just so cartoony and poorly-written, I expect most players will want to skip it.

At the very least, the idea of a Baseball-themed Dice Game seems like it has a lot of potential, and I think there’s some merit to the idea of the pitcher and batter rolling against each other, with the batter aiming to match the selection of the pitcher, and the pitcher trying to fool the batter by choosing something unexpected. It’s a solid foundation for a competitive Dice Game that works well as a metaphor for the competing goals of a batter and pitcher.

The problem here is that’s just a good foundation, and Cats Baseball does little to actually build on that foundation. The competitive prediction amounts to little more than a glorified version of paper-rock-scissors, where players have don’t really have any reason to choose one option over another, and as such the results are nearly random.

However, it’s even worse than this, because the winner of this paper-rock-scissors game doesn’t necessarily “win” anything, they just go on to roll a die that’s more favorable to their side, but that die can still randomly favor the other player anyway. In one matchup shortly into the game with me as the batter, I lost three consecutive paper-rock-scissors matchups, only to have the subsequent dice roll award me with two home runs and a triple anyway, handing me a win that did not in any way feel earned. And I could easily see the opposite happening – a player doing everything right, and still losing. And while that may be true of life, it makes for a pretty terrible game.

Because of this, Cats Baseball is a pretty depressing game, because even though so much of the arbitrary story and thematic elements here do nothing for the game, the concept of a Baseball-themed competitive Dice Game still holds a lot of potential. But not only does Cats Baseball do absolutely nothing with that potential, it presents players with a miserable experience dominated by pure randomness. Don’t bother with this.

tl;dr – Cats Baseball is a Baseball-themed Board Game (or more accurately, Dice Game), where the pitcher and batter compete to out-predict each others’ moves. Unfortunately, this amounts to little more than a random game of paper-rock-scissors, with more randomness tossed in as the winner rolls a die that can randomly negate that win. Add in an unnecessary, disposable story about cat-people in a Hunger Games-inspired baseball-driven dystopia, and it’s clear that Cats Baseball had no coherent vision from the start. Don’t bother with this.

Grade: D

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