Amusement devices: games – Card or tile games – cards or tiles therefor – Sports or outdoor recreational activities
Reexamination Certificate
1999-02-12
2001-01-09
Passaniti, Sebastiano (Department: 3711)
Amusement devices: games
Card or tile games, cards or tiles therefor
Sports or outdoor recreational activities
C273S277000, C273S244000, C273S308000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06170829
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to baseball board games that simulate the performances of real-life teams and players.
BACKGROUND
2. Description of Prior Art
Of the table baseball games that re-create the season statistics of real-life players, the most popular ones are based on the concepts incorporated in U.S. Pat. No. 1,536,639 by Clifford van Beek (1925). The baseball game of Clifford van Beek involved the following:
The rolling of two different dice to produce a two-digit number between 11 and 66.
Using the number as an index into a set of play result symbols on a baseball player card. For example, dice roll number 12 on Babe Ruth's card might yield play result number 14.
Using the play result symbol to look up a play result on a playing board. For example, play result 14 might yield a strikeout.
The baseball games that derive in part from van Beek's baseball game include the APBA Major League Baseball Game (by Richard Seitz), The APBA Major League Baseball Master's Game, Strat-O-Matic Baseball, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,822,043 (1989) to Carter. Although van Beek's concept and its various later developments have many obvious strengths, as is witnessed by their market appeal, the concept has certain limitations. These limitations are the following, each of which is appears in one or more of these baseball games:
The heavy reliance upon tables, which take up space, creates a space limitation. If a gamemaker attempts to include every essential characteristic of baseball in a table game, he discovers he must leave something out. Sometimes rich, natural language descriptions of baseball are excluded in order to make room for tables. This characteristic reflects an absence of emphasis on presentation, unlike the effort to enhance the sports event which we witness when Major League Baseball is presented by its own players in their act of playing a game on the field or by radio and television sports announcers. Often features other than natural language play descriptions are excluded from a game due to the space limitations created by its structure. For example, in all table baseball games, the ability to reproduce a pitcher's earned run average suffers from such limitations.
The use of 36 two-digit numbers from 11 to 66 as generated by two dice to encode the characteristics of baseball players apparently limits the number of characteristics that can be easily encoded, thus maximizing the list of symbols needed to encode the characteristics.
The minimal play procedure is needlessly complex and requires the following steps and often many more:
1. Load different types of dice into a shaker or pick them up.
2. Shake the dice.
3. Roll the dice.
4. Read the result from the dice in a prescribed manner to produce a two-digit number.
5. Locate a prescribed column on a playing board or card and use the two-digit number as a row index to locate a specific row.
6. Read the intermediate or final result from the specified row.
The play-by-play results of a game of baseball come from the numbered rows in several tables, which involves the person playing the game in the activity of looking up numbers in the columns and rows of the tables.
The heavy reliance upon tables has encouraged complication. For example, the advanced version of a baseball game may add many features of baseball onto the basic game, but it accomplishes this by adding one additional table per feature, which forces the game player to look up a sequence of results in tables, adding considerably to his effort. In addition, the restrictiveness of the tabular game structure leads to unusual conventions which are contrary to reality. In one game, many baseball plays were allowed to occur only in severely limited situations. Because only 41 possibilities with at most three slight variations among them could occur with the bases empty, only about 41 plays were possible in that situation. In another game, the effect of the “pitcher tired” heading is only felt with a runner on base, not with the bases empty.
The heavy reliance upon tables makes the playing procedure for producing an out often more complex than the playing procedure to produce hit. The tendency of real-life baseball to become a game of outs rather than of exciting base runner advances is enhanced in the table games.
The reliance upon the use of two dice, each die representing a digit, to produce 36 possible random numbers is not a very effective aspect of game structure because it requires the repetition of all 36 numbers along with their corresponding results on the card for each baseball player, which uses up valuable space which could be better used and because it allows only 36 base possibilities to be encoded. This builds in a restriction on the number of play possibilities that must be overcome through further layers of structuring—and too often this results in more tables.
The reliance upon numbers as opposed to non-numeric symbols leads to the inclusion of numeric calculations which must be performed by game players, producing tedium and fatigue. For example; some plays require the game player to perform at least two separate subtraction operations such as 51-23-12 to produce a play result such as whether a runner stretches a single.
Great detail is lacking in the events of a game. Many events that occur in real-life baseball, such as realistic rundown plays, or dogs on the field, are excluded from a table game. Other events which consist of complex sequences such as unusual error followed by unusual error followed by unusual runner advance, are excluded from table games.
The limitations in Clifford van Beek's concept entail that any instantiation which attempts to incorporate the full range of novelty and detail found in a real-life baseball game will encounter many obstacles in its design-most likely the game will be extremely complicated or else linguistically inexpressive, as is evident in the marketed versions of table baseball games for adults.
OBJECTS AND ADVANTAGES
Several objects and advantages of the present invention are the following:
To provide a highly efficient method of encoding player characteristics and a highly efficient basic game-playing procedure, which together reduce the experience of complexity for the game player, thus making possible and facilitating the accomplishment of the other objects of this invention and producing the other advantages.
To provide a baseball game which incorporates a sufficient number of important characteristics of the real-life game of baseball to qualify as advanced, in the minds of advanced users.
To provide a baseball game that includes rich natural language play descriptions.
To provide a baseball game that reproduces the statistics of real-life baseball players including the earned run average of pitchers with greater accuracy than in other games.
To provide a richly featured baseball game which evenso can be played at different levels of complexity depending upon the level of advancement or age of the game player.
To encode player characteristics into non-numeric symbols, with each symbol capable of encoding many characteristics without subordinating the encoding of any one characteristics to any other.
To arrange play results in short lists rather than in tables of many rows and columns.
To incorporate a multitude of features into the elemental structure of the game instead of by adding on one table with many rows and columns per feature, thus avoiding table lookup operations that occur along two axes.
To provide a playing procedure for producing outs which is often easier than the playing procedure for producing hits. Thus, the experience of playing the game will be is one in which exciting plays are emphasized and dull plays; are deemphasized.
To limit table lookups in tables of many rows and columns to only rare occurrence.
To distribute play results across 100 cards, which avoids the “36” limitation imposed by using two dice to produce two digits. See
FIGS. 15 through 128
.
To produce over 100 verbally detailed results of each type of hit (single, d
Mendiratta Vishu
Passaniti Sebastiano
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