Blaseball: The Card Game is a real thing that will be crowdfunded on the internet

Beloved community-driven online sports game Blaseball will be ported to the tabletop this spring. Titled Blaseball: The Card Game, it will be produced by original creators The Game Band in collaboration with Wayfinder Games. A crowdfunding campaign is set to launch sometime in the next few months.

Blaseball originated in 2020 as a high-concept pandemic project by Game Band creative director Sam Rosenthal. Since then, the game has taken on a life of its own on the wider internet. It features fictional teams, fictional players, and bizarre random events to fuel what is ostensibly a passive simulation, one that relies on something like a box score to translate its action into statistics and scores.

But Blaseball’s biggest moments tend to come from its community, which imbues its many storylines with drama through everything from fan-made art to slash fic and beyond via a raucous Discord server and on Reddit. Blaseball even had to go on hiatus recently due to its popularity, resulting in a shortened regular season in November. It’s that kind of energetic community engagement that may have led to the creation of Blaseball: The Card Game (Blazeball: TCG) in the first place.

While there aren’t many details about the game revealed just yet, we do know it will be a two-player competitive head-to-head experience that takes place during a climactic ninth inning. Each player will lead either the Auric All-Stars, Blaseball’s reigning champs, or the Canis Underdogs on their journey from the bottom to a possible championship. The matchup is subtitled Set #1, which suggests there could be expansions in the future. Developers have confirmed the card game will play a bit differently compared to the original, as it takes place “in a separate, splintered timeline, where some things are the same, and some things are different.”

Despite its confusing acronym, Blaseball: TCG will not be a traditional trading card game. Developers have already confirmed, for instance, that there won’t be randomized booster packs to support the release. Players also won’t need any prior experience or knowledge of Blaseball to play. Developers are also emphasizing that “the fans’ ability to make their own original fanwork remains the same.” That means the same open-door policies for fan-made content that have helped the web game become so popular will be in the mix to help boost the popularity of the card game.

Wayfinder Games also confirmed that NFTs are not part of their process. That means using Kickstarter, which announced it would move its technology to the blockchain, is out of the question.