I Asked for a Box Score. I Ended Up Building a Universe.

I like to tell people that my preferred gaming type has long been simulation games. Beyond all of the imagination and world-building, I just like being able to see how a universe plays out over the course of a season or multiples.

As a longtime baseball fan, my childhood was full of these kinds of games, but it wasn't until I got to college and started playing Front Office Football , Baseball Mogul & Out of the Park Baseball that my world expanded mightily. The chance to do more than just pen & paper simulations, and get immersed in the game mechanics of a fictional universe just appealed to a certain part of my brain.

And finally, I discovered I wasn't alone, and I no longer needed my friends to play along!

So with that backdrop in mind, I'm going to try to wrap my head around explaining how over the past two weeks, I've gotten immersed in building a simulation for a fake sport - Viperball - that stemmed from a single reddit post on a college football subreddit asking, "What if the entire 1894 Yale team came back to life?" that sent me down a rabbit hole of thinking, "what would it look like?" and "how it could be possible

What if the entire 1894 Yale team came back to life?

494 votes, 403 comments. 1894 Yale was the only other college football team besides Indiana to go 16-0, so obviously the were the best team during…

The rabbit hole that started in the case began with me digging into my sports sim background to devise what a plausible kind of football for the pre-forward pass era would look like in modern times. After coming up with a few concepts I liked, I just wanted to see a box score of this sport.

When I couldn't get an LLM to generate a realistic looking boxscore for me, based on the specifications I drew up for this sport -- a lateral dominant, gridiron football variant that borrows from rugby sevens and Aussie Rules Football -- I started wondering if I could make a lightweight simulator that would simulate games and give me the box scores.

So all of this started with that in mind.

That time I invented a sport, by accident.

Much like the first time I came up with a sport, this wasn't really the purpose at the time. In the case of tennis polo (see below) it was raining a lot and I had to keep some kids occupied and we co-designed a diversion that ended up being extremely popular with the kids. (I'm not sure we would've had the same success doing something like that in a world with smart phones, tbh.)

The Viperball name comes from an original variant of my first designed sport, a summer camp diversion called Toccer (Tennis Polo).

I've written about this elsewhere, including on the 20th anniversary of Toccer two years ago .

The thing is, inventing toccer and evolving the game took shape long after camp. I started researching what other sports and their design quirks. I've always found it strange that the major games of today were all invented a long time. Sure there are things like skateboarding, snowboarding, and even pickleball or ultimate frisbee that were more modern inventions. But team sports seem calcified and the lack of adapation within them has always bugged me some.

There was a Wired story a long time ago that implored more game designers to invent sports and back when I was still in the throes of Toccer, I shared this article a lot. Still, none of this really tells what you made me spent the last week designing a computer simulation of a football variant sport that no one will ever play?

Building a modern sport, using a text sim wrapper

The biggest barrier besides money to a new sport's proliferation is play testing. Board game designers are constantly trying to get their games in front of people, sports designers are the same, it's just a lot harder to do. I used to bribe people in college with pizza to come to the park on Sundays and do some Toccer playtesting in the early post-camp years.

Not only do I have no interest in that right now, I mostly wanted to do some testing on development workflows with this tool, and it was also less important to me that Viperball ever become a real sport, I just wanted to built my first text-sim after years of both false starts and the prohibitive cost of attempting that.

The cost of doing this was pretty small initially, before I got pretty wrapped up into it. But it was a lot of fun building somethng I'd been thinking about for years -- more the sim part -- than the fictional sport.

The goal here in this newsletter is to talk you through Viperball, what I've learned about the mechanics of games and sports along the way both with building this and looking back at the Toccer eras as well.

There will be game data, feature lookbacks and more along the way as I've already assembled so much content just from the past two weeks of building what's a fully built platform with lots of game modes already. Viperball isn't anything more than a text sim and that's by design, but you'll see a rich narrative simulation.

I got my box scores, it just took thousands of lines of code to get there