I loved playing strat-o-matic as a kid. Played with friends, but spent many nights playing game after game by myself. My family never went on vacation and I never went to camp or any other of the typical summer kid stuff, so I spent many summer nights playing strat-o-matic and managing both teams.
Fast forward to college and I found a bunch of baseball lovers so I started up again. I worked a restaurant job so I spent lots of late nights after a shift with some cheap beer and playing the game.
I discovered fantasy sports a few years ago, so I’ve been playing those. But I recently saw an ad for strat-o-matic and I considered buying the game again. I don’t know anyone who plays, but I figured it might be fun to have it around for some weekend nights when I’m home alone.
Oh man, the hours we would play that back in college. This was the late 80’s. I remember one year a big group of us rented a bus to go to spring break and we played a whole season of strat-o-matic baseball on the bus during the drive down.
Strat-o-matic was often played by D&Ders who were sports fans in my experience.
Strat-o-matic was a baseball simulation. They would have a card for most major league players. You could play an actual major league team or make up your own teams from the cards. The cards would have outcomes corresponding to all the possible dice rolls. There were three 6 sided dice. One die would indicate which column to look in (there were 3 columns on the pitcher card and 3 on the batter’s), the sum of the other two dice would then indicate the outcome. Sometimes you had to refer to defensive player’s rating to determine the outcome. There was a point when a pitcher would become “tired” if they allowed a couple of hits. There is probably more that I am forgetting right now, but I know I had a lot of fun with the game and was just thinking about looking one up the other day to play with my son.
There’s also a computer version of Strat-O-Matic, which is pretty nice if you want to simulate entire seasons to answer questions like “What if the Phillies had kept Cliff Lee this year and not signed Roy Halliday?” It’s not as good a simulator as Baseball Mogul, but it’s very detailed.
I never did play Strat, but I do play APBA Baseball - very similar game. I’ve been in a 10-team league since 1994 (the league goes back to 1973, IIRC).
APBA works like this -
-Everything runs off rolling two six-sided dice and reading them as tens and ones (typically its a red and a white die, with the red die representing tens)
-the card for the batter has numbers from 11 to 66 for a total of 36 possible results for each batter which is then cross indexed against a chart with 41 results; the distribution of results varies depending on that batter’s statistics. IOW, if I roll a “66” for a hitter with decent power it might be a result of a 1 indicating a homer, for a less powerful hitter it might be a 6 indicating a double, etc. Certain results tend to show up at certain numbers - a roll of a 13 cross-indexes to a 14 result on
-once you have the chart number, that can be modified by defense or pitching.
It sounds complex but in play its very fast. A game can take 20-25 minutes, less if you’re playing both teams.
Strat is a little more statistically complex than APBA - the pitcher has more effect on the result in Strat than in APBA, for example. APBA’s strength is that once you’ve played a fair amount, you get familiar with the chart results and only need to reference it when you’re not certain of the result.
I played a lot of APBA baseball and football when I was in high school (late 70s-early 80s). Then, I got into D&D, and left it behind for a few years. Late in my college years, I got into a Strat-o-Matic football league (we had enough people in the league that we had one coach for each of the then-28 teams in the NFL). I played SOM football and baseball for several years, but stopped again in the mid-90s when I dropped out of a SOM baseball league which had gotten pretty dysfunctional.
I now have the computer version of SOM football (they have computer version of all their games now, AFAIK). There’s a fair number of people who play in online leagues using the computer versions of the game, so, even if you don’t have any other players locally, you can still get into a league.
I’ve been playing in a 30 team league for about 12 years, we just use the computer version now but started off as a board-game based group. Here’s one of the two league websites; the other one is for rosters and transactions.
We love the game and it has stayed very true to the original format, but now w automated stat-keeping and the ability to play online.
There’s a lotta people still playing, and some get pretty damn into it, as you can see in the stratfan forums.
