Special Event: Blaseball Season 13
March 8, 2021 7:22 AM - Subscribe

Blaseball is quite recently back! As we head into what is obviously an extremely lucky and not incredibly dangerously cursed at all Season 13, the two biggest pieces of news of the Internet Blaseball League are (1) teams will now be getting their own official in-game blallparks with who knows WHAT implications, and (2) there are new expansion teams in the league: the Ohio Worms, the Core Mechanics, and the Atlantis Georgians. Rounding things out, the infamously Ascended and thereafter absent Baltimore Crabs are back in the league, raising the total team count from 20 to 24.

Relatively recently previously in Blaseball discussion: Season 12, Season 11, and between those two the special (demi-canonical?) exhibition event The Coffee Cup. More generally, all FanFare posts tagged "blaseball".

"Relatively" because prior to last week's reopening with Season 12, the game had been on an extended siesta since late October as the development team The Game Band did a bunch of work under the hood and took a well-deserved break from the frantic 24/7 lifestyle they'd accidentally created for themselves three months earlier when Blaseball blew up in the first place.

If you're wandering in after not really paying attention before now (perhaps out of a sense of resignation because after months of quiet That Blaseball Thing Is Apparently Happening Again), there are a bunch of things that have been written recently and previously about what the deal sort of is; Ampersand692 mentioned this Defector article last seeason, and Cat Manning's classic Blaseball explainer from last August capture the spirit very well while also being from an impossible 8 seasons back and thus missing a million little developments. If you prefer a more chaotic in-the-soup approach to figuring out what's going on, you can do worse than following the twitter feed of the Blaseball Commissioner (who is Doing a Good Job) and rabbitholing down the various accounts they tweet and retweet about.

But in the end it's just Blaseball and you can't really do it wrong. If you're new to the game, you can sign up for free at blaseball.com and arbitrarily pick a favorite team (you can change your mind later) and start watching games play out in real time; betting and buying snacks (with fake money, everything is free) is optional but possibly amusing; and if you want to go deeper, there's an official discord server where almost all of the game's narrative and character content is invented on the fly collaboratively by fans in text chat.
posted by cortex (6 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
What happened the last time a game went past the top of an hour again?
posted by nubs at 10:50 AM on March 8, 2021


The whole schedule just pushed back an hour while that spillover game played out. (The book also had some redacted details of what happened if that happened again, but we never found out because there's been no 2+ hour game on the books.)

Back when spillovers did happen, we didn't have a week-long schedule posted on the blaseball main page, though, so it's unclear whether that implies some difference in this new calendrical era or if that whole schedule through the end of the regular season and Earlpostseason would indeed just shift by an hour (which seems like the best bet).
posted by cortex at 7:54 AM on March 9, 2021


Also, in some sad Shoe Thieves news: long-time player and sentient cloud of smoke and vapor Hotbox Sato (it/its), shortly after returning from an 11-game absence after being swept Away by Flooding, was incinerated by a rogue umpire this morning. I personally question whether Hotbox (also known as Single Sato for its ability to produce clutch singles in times of need) was in any way actually physically harmed or transformed by the process of incineration or if it merely felt unwelcome and chose to leave.

Hotbox has been replaced by newcomer Alx Keming, about whom essentially nothing has been canonized but who has an extremely good name.
posted by cortex at 8:01 AM on March 9, 2021 [2 favorites]


So both popcorn and stale popcorn max out at 99; at that level popcorn pays 300 coins per win, stale popcorn 800 coins per loss.

Judge your team and buy accordingly (or just max both like I did)
posted by nubs at 11:26 AM on March 10, 2021


And as a Moist Talkers fan, everything old feels new again...strong start to the season, and then watching the Crabs catch up. Maybe this season they won't pass us, though there's a strong history of first round disappointments as well.
posted by nubs at 5:23 PM on March 10, 2021


Well, shoot - maybe they weren't up to staying ahead of the Crabs and the Fridays, but we edged out the Dallas Steaks for the 3rd spot. Keep on spittin'!
posted by nubs at 2:39 PM on March 12, 2021


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