Show HN: Balk – A Baseball Game

Balk is a baseball game. Things like MLB Showdown and other baseball games captured my attention growing up, but never really filled the void of a game. They were fun to look at and scheme, but the game itself was missing something. I think baseball lends itself really well to game design. There are a lot of games that exist inside the game of baseball. It’s a deeply flawed and broken sport, but so are humans, and in some ways that makes baseball better.

It’s baseball. You already know the rules, and that’s the point. You play against another person, or against Tin Pete, the bot. A game takes about 30 minutes, honestly I’m not sure, I can play it fast but I’m using the hotkeys.

It’s what I’d consider alpha, and I’m still trying to find what’s fun. It’s been a nice outlet and a break from solving business problems, though the same skill set gets invoked: distill a complex idea down to its most basic implementation.

Stack is Java, React, Postgres, on a $5 Digital Ocean instance. I'm sure you can bring it down if you are bored.

There’s some slop TOS and privacy policy up. No trackers, nothing sold. Happy to update the intention was that these were easy to understand and I'm not interested in selling your data.

If you want to see how it was built, day by day, counted from the repo: https://balk.club/blog/timeline.html