Biggest Update Yet

So many updates, getting ready for launch Mid Sept:

DICEY DIAMOND The Bullpen Update

NEW BOOSTS 33 BALLPARKS 9

Four weeks with one through-line: the end of a game got built. The 8th and 9th innings became real fights, a run can now keep going long past the 9th, and — finally — progress survives the device it was played on.

BULLPEN REWRITTEN Seven arms in the 8th, seven more in the 9th The old bullpen was a handful of closers that mostly taxed you — a flat penalty, a lost reroll — and three setup men who did the same thing smaller. The whole roster is gone, replaced by two rosters built on a clean split: setup men restrict, closers attack.

A setup man now enters the inning before the closer's — the 8th, or the 7th on a Gold pennant run — with a one-banner entrance instead of the closer's full card-and-theme takeover. Each one takes a resource off the table:

The Knuckleballer Nobody knows where it's going. Every item in your dugout is locked. The Submariner He keeps it down — every 6 in your swing is dead. No hand, no score. The Quick Pitcher Exactly one reroll per at-bat. No more, and no fewer. The Spitballer Doctored ball. Your hitters' own powers do nothing. The Rubber Arm He works the count — every reroll you take raises the inning target 10%. The Lefty Specialist A Home Run is an OUT. A Grand Slam still lands — that's the counter-play he leaves you. The Wild Thing Every roll, one random tray die locks solid and can't be rerolled by anything. Then the door swings again for a closer that goes after the build itself: The Fireballer, The Vulture, The Chess Master (the inning's first hit locks the hand type — every other shape is an out from there), The Headhunter (a brushback silences a random fan mid-inning), The Shift (forces a die into your zone), The Changeup Artist, and The Showboat.

Seven signature clubs now field a complete bullpen — their setup man in the 8th, their closer in the 9th — so scouting the schedule tells you something real. Unassigned clubs still draw at random.

Every retired arm's rule stayed wired at its original site. A run saved in the bottom of the ninth against an arm that no longer exists still finishes correctly.

CLUTCH NEW Eighteen hitters built to beat that bullpen A new rarity — Clutch — sits at Rare draft odds and exists for exactly one purpose. Every Clutch hitter ignores setup man and closer powers entirely while he's standing in: the mound plays like a plain arm. On top of that shield, one of four payoffs — ×1.5 Mult against those arms, +100 Fans, +5 Mult, or +$10 when his swing ends the inning.

Reggie Jax, Joe Carters, Kirk Gibbers, David Freeze, Jete Rivera, Bucky Denton, Carlton Fisker, Ozzie Smitty and ten more. The shield and the payoff ride in the same enhancement, so it's one card line and one dot — no card in the game reads as a wall of text.

BENCH NEW Pinch hitters, and the dugout ceremony Up to two one-time-use hitters ride the bench, and they exist for the moment a boss fight is slipping away. Tap a bench card to arm Swap Mode; the next tap on a lineup slot pulls that starter for the rest of the game. One swap per game — you get one shot at the right moment.

On game over or victory the pinch hitter is consumed and the original starter walks back into his slot. Nothing about your lineup leaks between games.

The swap gets a real entrance: a gold clutch aura on the bench cards, a dugout ceremony as the two players trade places, and a calm path through all of it that freezes the loops for reduced-motion and battery-saver players.

LINEUP NEW Where a hitter bats now matters Roughly one shop free agent in ten rolls a lineup-position power — a teal label that sits deliberately off the rarity ladder and replaces the rarity text on the card. The power only fires from its slot in the order, which turns the batting-order screen from bookkeeping into a decision.

Top of the Order Batting 1st or 2nd: takes an extra base on every hit. Clean-up Hitter Batting 3rd, 4th or 5th: ×2 Mult on every hit. Back of the Lineup Batting 8th or 9th: +1 die every at-bat. Utility Man Any spot in the order: +100 Fans on every hit. PENNANTS NEW Bronze, Silver, Gold — and Platinum Every league can now be won at four escalating rule sets, banked per save slot. Silver and Gold stack opening outs and consumable-slot losses. Platinum does everything Gold does, and then sets the base reroll allowance to zero. Not reduced — zero. Bonus rerolls become the only rerolls that exist, which turns Spring Training vouchers and reroll dots from nice-to-have into the spine of the build.

EXTRAS NEW Extra Innings, and the end of the world Clearing the 9th no longer has to end the run. Extra Innings keeps the ladder climbing to the 26th — the longest game ever actually played — on a back-loaded curve, so the early extras are a gentle 1.4× while a finished build has somewhere to keep going. Any season win can go to extras now, not just the championship.

The top rung is the entire planet: 8,125,000,000 fans signed. Clear an inning at that number and the game plays its only true finale — four beats on one canvas clock:

TIME BEAT WHAT HAPPENS 0.0s Impact The counter slams to the world population and the screen whites out. The glass takes its first hit. 0.9s Shatter Cracks spider out from the impact point; the pane breaks into shards that tilt and fall away. 2.0s Flood Fans pour in from every edge and a crowd tide rises from the bottom. The field disappears under people. 6.6s Overflow Solid crowd, edge to edge. The plaque and the exit land. It's one canvas and a handful of divs — no libraries, no fetched assets, crowd drawn as flat 2–3px pixel people to match the rest of the art, particle budget halved on mobile. Reduced motion skips straight to the overflow still. The feat that records it (The Whole World) is secret, because finding out it exists is the reward.

PLAYOFFS TUNED The postseason is the wall again Playoffs used to be a rounding error — a semifinal asked about 15% more than a regular game and the ramp held at the game-10 rung, so the title run was often the easiest stretch of the season. Now there's a real four-team bracket with seeds, simulated semifinals and opponent records, and the numbers behind it climb hard: the semifinal asks reg×1.2 and the championship reg×1.45, with the within-season ramp still rising through both.

RIVALRY REWRITTEN Trash talk that the engine already knows how to enforce "Riled Up" is retired as a term — these are Rivalry games everywhere a player can see them. More importantly, all seven gimmicks were rebuilt. The old set each had a bespoke, hand-wired site in the game loop; the new seven are expressed entirely as pitcher-power flags that already exist elsewhere, so a rivalry rule enforces itself wherever that flag is already wired.

Dugout Lockout, Dead Sixes, No Time To Think, Bats Silenced, Stall Tactics, Wall Robbery, Nailed Down. Old gimmick ids alias to their closest replacement, so a season that was dealt its slate before the rewrite still resolves instead of quietly playing a rivalry game with no rivalry in it.

CONCOURSE NEW Thirty-three new Superfan Boosts Section 11 — The Concourse — added thirteen fans and, behind them, four engine capabilities the roster didn't have: live value badges that count up on the card itself, loss interception, hand-type history, and a single shared path for probability.

That last one is the Loaded Dice Dealer, who doubles every listed probability in the game and stacks per copy. Making him possible meant routing every "X% chance" and "1 in N" roll through one function — which also means card text now restates its own odds with the boost applied, instead of lying to you.

The most recent batch goes after the faces nobody wanted: Snake Eyes, The Deuce Crew, Two-Buck Tuesday, Rule of Three, The Triplets, The Trifecta, Fab Four, The Quad Squad, The Minimalist, The Bargain Hunter. Low rolls are a build now.

THE PITCH NEW Something finally gets thrown Locking a swing used to jump straight to the jumbotron: you pressed SWING and a board full of numbers appeared. Nothing was ever thrown, so there was no moment of not-knowing — and no moment of not-knowing means no payoff when the number lands.

Now every swing opens the same way, hit or out. The arm comes set, the ball travels mound to plate, and the outcome is revealed at the plate: a crack of white at the contact point and a batted ball carrying out on an arc scaled to the hit type — a single dies in the shallow grass, a grand slam leaves the frame — or the mitt pops, dust kicks up, and nothing leaves the dirt.

The stands answer next. Every line on the jumbotron now carries provenance, so as each one lands the crew card that earned it rattles in the stands and shouts its own number. "×3 MULT" is attributable to a fan you can see instead of a name to match against the tray. Only after that does the board open.

PARKS NEW Nine ballparks, each with its own weather Home parks are feat rewards, and each one is a full kit — sky gradients for three times of day, wall material, grass and clay palettes, crowd tones, skyline, scoreboard colours and its own ambient weather.

Foundry Field The ballpark they built inside a working steel mill. Slag wall with lava still running through the cracks; it rains soot. Skyline Yards Downtown neon, a blimp, and $19.50 hot dogs. Castaway Cay Sand infield, gulls, ocean past the wall. Twister Flats Funnel in left, lightning, no rain delays. Dockside Grounds Fogged in, lighthouse sweeping the turf. The Sandlot Board fence, fireflies. Over it is an out. Frostbite Field Permanent snow, aurora, frozen clay. Championship Grounds Bunting, searchlights, confetti. Foreground weather is drawn in its own layer above the players, so you play inside the storm rather than behind it.

SAVES NEW A season is many hours long. Losing one is the worst bug this game could ship. Cloud sync landed as a platform-agnostic core plus a thin transport: Steam Cloud through the Electron shell, iCloud through a Capacitor plugin. Neither backend knows anything about reconciliation — the rules that decide who wins a conflict live in exactly one place, and can be tested without a device.

Two deliberate design decisions run through all of it:

LAYOUTS NEW Landscape thumb-rails and a rebuilt shop board Mobile landscape got a purpose-built layout with thumb rails instead of a stretched portrait screen, and the desktop three-column layout was reworked to match it. Anything whose content is identical between the two now lives in one shared module with a dense flag for landscape's tighter type — only the things the two layouts genuinely disagree about (what stacks in which rail, where the buttons go) stay separate.

The desktop shop is a proper board now: felt insets, labelled zones, pack artwork keyed by kind and tier, and a replace view that pins the incoming signing above your deck so you can see exactly who's getting benched for him.

FIRST RUN NEW Onboarding, twice New players get a forced rookie tutorial — a coach walkthrough gated on the actual actions (tap, swing, reroll, hold) rather than a wall of text with a Next button — followed by spotlight steps over the real UI. The shop gets its own separate tutorial the first time you walk into it, because that's where the game stops being baseball and starts being a deckbuilder. ACCESS TUNED No flashing, on any device Several ceremonies opened with a full-screen strobe. It was authored for a phone at arm's length; on a monitor a foot from your face it was genuinely painful, and a photosensitivity hazard everywhere. Every one of them is gone — the whole game is flash-free by design now, and the ceremonies were rebuilt to land without one.

Battery-saver and reduced-motion paths run through all the new effects rather than around them, a privacy policy page shipped, and the pixel font is self-hosted with the rest of the bundle.

CUT RETIRED Gone this cycle The Straight and Full House shape cheers — the hit-type cheers carry that weight now, and the scoring path lost a whole class of drift between the live odds and the actual swing. The entire old bullpen: The Iceman, The Screwballer, The Tar Baron, Glen Maddog, The Pickoff Artist, The Perfectionist, the original Spitballer, and the three flat-tax setup men. Beer Snake — the low-sum fan cluster was too crowded. "The Clear" voucher, whose slot now holds Skirting the Rules (Two Pair counts as a Single). It kept the old id, so a save holding one picks up the new effect. The terms "Riled Up" and "Fan Joker", in all player-facing text. Every retirement above kept its metadata wired and its ids reserved. A run in progress against something that no longer exists still finishes.