

This image was a widely-used (and, I’m guessing, royalty-free) image back in the 1990’s This image showed up *everywhere* at the time… If you have any baseball magazines, yearbooks or scorecards from the 1990’s… especially minor league publications… there’s a good chance that this guy is in there somewhere, often in an advertisement - “CATCH A DEAL at Kuhlschrank Pontiac/Oldsmobile!” One last aside then I promise I’ll get to the contents of the game… The cover of the Instructions booklet gave me a laugh… I can understand the convenience of virtual dice, but there’s something satisfying about rolling real dice… just not with that friggin’ dice cup.

I also found out that some players will use a smartphone/tablet app to replace the dice. Oh, another thing… the dice cup seems to be a standard APBA thing, but after the dice got jammed in there for the 5th time, the cup got jettisoned. …through sheer carelessness my photo includes the plastic bag that the dice and dice cup came in (in case you were wondering what that was on the right on top of the chart).įYI, if you use a scoresheet to track the game, then the board isn’t needed. Here’s the the primary bits for game play… These tabletop game posts tend to have a long shelf life and I want to minimize the number of people who say “You got it wrong, ya big dummy!”

Pulling it out I remembered why it got shoved in a closet… This mid-1990’s edition, which I suspect was made to be sold relatively cheaply in retail outlets, came unappealingly packaged, had an instruction book that wasn’t particularly well written, and came with teams that didn’t inspire excitement: Team sets for the 1994 Astros (66-49 in a strike-shortened season, 2nd place), 1994 Tigers (53-62, 5th place) and another envelope which contained “20 of Baseball’s All-Time Greats!”… one of whom was in “witness relocation” – more on that in a bit.Ī quick note to people who already play APBA: If I make any mistakes or misrepresent something about the game, please let me know in the comments so I can correct it. All the way in the back, on the top shelf, under Cadaco All-Star Baseball and next to Donruss Top Of The Order, there was the out-of-sight-out-of-mind box containing a mid-1990’s edition of APBA. So I went into The Shlabotnik Report’s World Headquarters (aka the spare room my wife allows me to occupy) and I looked into the recesses the closet where I keep a few games. This particular post has been in the works for months, and the idea was sparked when some mention about playing APBA was phrased in just the right way that it allowed a forgotten fact to bubble to the surface of my brain: “Wait a minute… don’t I have a copy of APBA in the closet?” This post is the latest in a very occasional series that give a broad overview of how different tabletop baseball games work.
