Suit #2, A. DeBeers, hovered over the graph-paper covered easel. He’d been staring at it for thirty seconds straight. They’d drawn a perfect square in the center, about half the area of the sheet, and a smaller square (or “base”) on each corner of the square, except the one closest to DeBeers. That one was—well, Mr. Bludgeon said “Home is what’s most important. You want to defend your home,” so home base was shaped eponymously, with its roof pointed towards base 1. The problem was, with the way the bases were currently configured, almost every “pitch” (that was the going name for it; Suit #3 [R. Digger] had pointed out that “shot” probably wasn’t a good vernacular to adopt in those early postbellum days) would head toward base 1 or base 2. There would never be a reason to run the entire square, a mechanic they realized was necessary to extend the game to the three-hour plus length necessary for proper crowd indoctrination. They’d figured out many of the core components, creating a game with:
two competing sides
projectiles and violent swings with blunt objects,
running to take over small plots of land,
an almost completely subjective grading standard with respect to the core judging mechanic allowing for manipulation of the very rules of combat, and
peanuts. People fucking loved peanuts back then,
and now they were hammering out the more detailed mechanics. DeBeers unclipped the sheet from the top of the easel and turned it forty-five degrees to the left, re-clipping it at the corner. Now, it was a diamond.
He called the other three suits over.
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