Baseball, specifically Red Sox Baseball, was a Big Deal for kids growing up in the 1970s in suburban Boston. We all collected and traded cards, prayed to be put on the Red Sox for little league, kept score watching on channel 38, played home run derby on the neighborhood tennis court, and established infinitely complex rules to mange “ghost runners” for wiffleball games with only four players. I can neither confirm nor deny reports of ritual burnings of Yankee cards.
Anyways, there was a dice-based baseball game we used to play when we couldn’t be outside. Not the exquisitely-complicated version created by some kid in Quebec in 1979 (I was 10 and that one was a little mind-numbing), but a really simple version that just associates rolls with outcomes. I’d totally forgotten about this until it popped up on my Pinterest feed a couple of months ago. Seemed like a fun and nostalgic Glowforge project, so I started playing with designs in Inkscape. It took awhile, but I’m quite pleased with the end result, which included not just standard cutting and etching but some cool magnets and an online component as well.
Note: You may notice that the engravings are all Mariners images, not the Red Sox. My kids grew up Mariners fans, and over the last 30 years that’s made me one too. Julio!!!
The game consists of a playing field inside a finger-joint box, magnetic bases and tokens, dice (purchased!) and a mobile scoreboard app. Most of the pieces are quarter-inch two-sided white oak veneer MDF from Craft Closet (a great source BTW, they even recommend GF settings for their materials). A QR code on the pitchers mound opens the scoreboard app on a phone, which sits in landscape mode in center field. Each roll of the dice corresponds to one at-bat, according to rules etched into the bottom of the lid.
Tokens are used to represent the batter and baserunners. Outs and runs are recorded via touches on the mobile app, and honestly that’s about it. The game is simple, 100% luck-based, yet kind of entertaining. And a ton of fun to put together; I love projects that combine multiple techniques.
The Field & Tokens
The field is 10×10 inches and comprised of a few different insets — cut separately but all together in this SVG file. Creating the infield shape took forever, intersecting and unioning arcs and lines and circles in Inkscape. I am (at best) an Inkscape hack, but am continually amazed at what a stellar job it does with really complex (for me) stuff. Of course each inset needed to deal with kerf width, which I described here and won’t belabor again.
I pre-stained a piece for the outfield grass using “Dragon’s Belly Green” Unicorn Spit, and used the natural white oak for the infield. The bases and pitchers mound are 1/8” Glowforge Draftboard, which took white acrylic paint well, and since it was half the depth of the oak, left a hidden space underneath for the magnets. For those I used some amazingly strong small rare earth magnets I found on Amazon — the same ones I used for the lid of the chess board I made last year.
Unfortunately the magnets didn’t quite fit into the holes underneath first, second and third bases. I was able to snip off enough using a wire cutter, but the material is really brittle and I wrecked quite a few before I was finished. Luckily they’re cheap and, since they were hidden under the board, looks didn’t matter. A few dabs of two-part epoxy held them in place great. The pitchers mound didn’t have magnets underneath, so I padded the extra space with a bit of cork sheet I had lying around.
The tokens are simple circles cut from more white oak for the home team (34, 24, 11 and 51) and mahogany for the visitors (33, 15, 10 and 20). I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out which numbers correspond to which of our favorite Mariners and Red Sox players. 😉 I used the drill press to very very carefully create a recess for magnets in the bottom of each one — careful to get the polarity right so that the tokens stick to the bases rather than jumping away from them!
The Box
The field is glued into a lidded box, which is handy for storage and keeps the dice from bouncing off the table during play. Having never built a laser-cut box before, I tried the “boxes.py” SVG generator and really can’t say enough good things about it. Choose your style, set your measurements and you’re ready to go. And because its output is a clean SVG file, it was super-easy to add engravings for the top and the dice combos.
Once again our old friend kerf is super-important to ensure a good fit, and it was a little tough to get right with thicker pieces. But my second try was a success and didn’t require a lick of glue to stay solid (the first attempt is now holding my supply of Unicorn Spit). The inset lid even snugs perfectly into place. My box was pretty simple, but there are tons of options to choose from. What a stellar resource.
Three coats of a clear satin spray polyurethane to protect the surfaces and the physical game was good go to. Now, on to the virtual!
The App
Some versions of the game use a cribbage-like setup with pegs to keep track of runs and outs. I played with that, and with manually-operated counter wheels, but really didn’t like either one. Instead I decided to build a mobile website, optimized for a landscape-mode phone, that could sit right in the box in center field. I added a little brace behind second base that should fit pretty much any phone. The pitchers mound has a QR code (I have QR Codes on the brain these days) that opens up the scoreboard app, so there’s no stupid URL to remember or lose. Just scan the code and place the phone into its nook. Works great!
The code for the app is up on github; if you have any cause to use it please feel free! It’s a ReactJS site, really nice for simple little apps like this that can be all client-side. I set things up using create-react-app, and don’t get me started on that. I literally just started with React three months ago, and CRA was (and basically still is) the default in every single “getting started” tutorial out there. But Javascript tools have the lifespan of a mayfly, and suddenly it’s deprecated. Something has got to give so that we can get developers off this new-tool treadmill, it’s just inane. Anyways.
There’s not too much to say about the app itself. Diceball.js holds the game state and logic, which is passed down to three controls: Scoreboard.js drives the aggregate and per-inning run display (tracking extra innings if necessary), OutsDisplay.js shows current outs in the inning, and ButtonBar.js handles game updates. Game state is persisted into local storage so you can resume games in progress, and a full undo chain lets you fix touch errors like double-tapping the “out” button by mistake. Because there’s no server-side processing, I was able to host it in my family Azure account simply by copying the files up to a storage account with web access enabled. Nice.
And that’s it! A lot of fun to make and to share. Until next time!
