"You know what they say, if there's blood on the field- play Meleeball!"

-Coach X

I've always been fascinated by sports leagues. It scratches the same part of my brain that likes grand strategy games about feudal conquests. But since I never got into actual sports growing up, I didn't have much pull toward most front-office sims. 

Around 2015 I decided maybe I can create a front office game based around a fictional sport, that way I wouldn't have to worry about a faithful sim of the matches themselves and just focus on the league level politics. Originally the game was going to be called Sportsball, but even then that joke had gotten to the point of just bumming me out. So instead I based it off a game my oldest friend and I used to play in my driveway- I had a shovel, he had a trowel, and we volleyed a racquetball off the garage door (we only broke the window once, still sorry Mom). We called it Meleeball and the only rules were 1) Pick any one thing with which to hit the ball 2) don't hit each other.

Over the years the sport grew in my head- I had weird fantasies of triangular playing fields, armed referees, 3 or more teams per match, the sky was the limit! But when I settled on this fake sport for my League game, I had to sort of drill down to basics. Two teams at a time, lineups of 5 athletes going head-to-head across the line so I only had to worry about 2 stat blocks at a time. Point totals started to rival basketball, sometimes a player would score negative points (I decided that was fine, this was a foul, or an injury, or both!), and the moment to moment of the game became more abstract.

The first couple attempts at playtesting were spotty. I would post on Facebook that I was running a tournament, people would comment and I'd generate them a team. Over the next day or two I'd simulate all the games and give out a play-by-play. Fun, but didn't allow for much feedback. Eventually I took it to my regular D&D group, and got MANY notes after a single session. Clearly the thing wasn't meant for a normal game night, seasons are too long and the games were still too abstract.

It was during the pandemic that the idea of a play-by-email model came to mind. I set up a discord and over the course of 10 weeks ran a full season for 5 friends (plus my team made it an even 6). This was a ton of fun, and I was able to roll a bunch of quality of life improvements into a second season, expanding the league to a full 10 teams! 

What I have uploaded here is the same onboarding files I used in these two discord tests, along with even more QoL improvements. That said, I don't know how user friendly the whole package is yet. In any case, feel free to dive in and see what 8 years (dear lord) of pecking away at a project gets you! If you are the same kind of weirdo as me, maybe this will scratch your itch too- or start to at least.