Tube Games

The two players select their lineups from imaginary players or actual players by converting their stats to the game's parameters. (This is easily done from mlb.com on the net.)

The Defensive team is the manager and catcher, selecting pitch types (Fast Ball, Off Speed, Pitch out, etc. )to get batters out.

Offensive managers and batters must then select a type of offense/ball in play strategy (Steal, Bunt, Hit and Run, Long Ball, etc.)The defensive team commits first with a "Pitch" card. The offensive team then orally calls its strategy. The results of the two choices are found by cross indexing them on a result matrix table. This is classic matrix game theory where one player is trying to minimize his opponent's results while maximizing his own.

Players can decide on the size of ballpark before the game.
There are rules for series play in order to give proper rest to pitchers. The game even has injury possibilities.

Great baseball action.

Football Strategy boils the sport down to play calling skill. The game's structure is simple: The defensive player selects one of 10 formation cards (ranging from an 8-man line "goal line stand" to a pass prevent defense with five safeties); the offensive player calls a play (a choice of 20, plus punting). Cross-indexing the choices on a matrix shows what happened. Except for "long gains", the outcome of each play against each defense is always the same. Dice are rolled only to determine the distance of long gains and the results of kickoffs and field goal attempts.

Each play consumes a prescribed number of seconds, from 15 to 45. The players mark off the time and play four quarters, following the standard football rules.

For variety, three types of offense ("pro style", "aerial game" and "ball control") are available, each with a different, though not radically different, results matrix.

Simple though it is, the game is engrossing (see the "More Information" screen), and play generally follows realistic patterns, though the handling of punts and on-side kicks (both more effective than in real life) is questionable. Also, because the design changed little after its debut in 1959, the plays and defenses don't reflect the state of the art in contemporary professional football. This is the era of Otto Graham, not Eli Manning.

For those who are so inclined, Football Strategy lends itself to mathematical analysis. Many years ago, an entrant into the tournament at Origins went to the trouble of using game theory to generate charts showing the optimal mix of plays in different situations. He reached the finals but, in a victory for human intuition over number crunching, lost the championship game by a touchdown and a field goal.

Sequence is a board and card game. The board shows all the cards (except for the Jacks) of two (2) standard 52-card decks, laid in a 10 x 10 pattern. The four corners are free spaces and count for all players equally.

The players compete to create rows, columns or diagonals of 5 connected checkers placed on the cards that the player has laid down. Two-eyed Jacks are wild, while one-eyed Jacks allow an opponent's checker to be removed. The game ends when someone has reached a specified number of connections.

In Suspend, you want to be the first player to get rid of your share of the 24 notched, rubber-tipped wire pieces that come with the game. How do you get rid of them? Throw them away? Hide them under a cushion? No – you must hang them from a shared tabletop stand, using only one hand to place the piece on an unoccupied space. If anything touches the table after you place your piece, you must remove and reposition it; if anything falls off, you have to keep those pieces and try to hang them again on future turns. The first player to suspend all of her pieces wins!

Pente is an abstract strategy game. Players place glass markers on intersections of a 19-by-19 grid (the same as in Go). The object of the game is to get five of your own markers in a row (4 with more than 2 players) or capture five pairs of your opponent's pieces. The first to do either wins. Capturing takes place when exactly two pieces are sandwiched between pieces of the opposite color. There are multiple variations of the game for greater challenge and complexity. The 20th anniversary edition is a deluxe version of the game with a large color game instruction book, quality game board, and six sets of different colored glass markers that allows play with up to 6 players.

Other five-in-a-row games include Go-Moku and Renju (which do not feature capturing), and Ninuki-Renju (which does).

Similar to:

CIRQUE
5ive Straight
Take 5
5 in a Row
Go-Moku
Renju