In Baseball Highlights 2045, games go only up to 6 innings and feature three types of athletes: Cyborgs (good at pitching), Robots (good at hitting), and "Natural" humans (good at fielding). From your 16-card roster, you draw 6 cards and play them one at a time during the game.
You'd expect that you either start as batting (or fielding), and then play the top of the inning until you get (or score) three outs, then switch and play the bottom of the inning. Because that's how baseball works.
But in this game, it's really different and hard to describe. When you play a card, it can 1) have an immediate effect (such as eliminating an opponent's batter) and 2) put batters on home plate that, if not eliminated by the opponent's next immediate action, will score base hits such as Singles and Doubles as indicated on the card.
So you play a card that has an immediate effect on the opponent and puts your batters on home plate that "threaten" to score base hits. Your opponent then plays a card whose immediate effect might eliminate some of your batters and puts their own batters on their own home plate. As you and the opponent alternate turns, the view switches back and forth between two baseball diamonds, one in which you're hitting and one in field you're fielding. It's like both halves of an inning are being played simultaneously, in two different space-time dimensions.
The game (not the inning, but the game) ends when both teams have played all 6 of their cards. The winning team is noted and you go on to play the next game in the series. Between games, you get to buy new players and discard old ones to strengthen your 16-card roster.
It's a pretty innovative and clever game system. But the strategy involved is so different from any strategy you might employ in baseball that it doesn't feel like baseball at all. And I hate the process of drafting new players between games, it's so boring.
I just don't like this game. It tries to make baseball more exciting by switching things up, but it just doesn't feel like baseball anymore. I once played a text-based baseball game that was written in BASIC, and that was way more fun.
