How Beastieball mixes athlete psychology and monster-taming - and how it rekindled my competitive spirit!
For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of the Pokémon franchise. Between the games, anime, TCG, merchandise and drawing my favourite Pokémon I've always found something uniquely fascinating about the designs, world and gameplay. Despite this, no official media ever quite gripped me the same was as Pokémon Showdown, a competitive battle simulator.
From school lunch breaks to after homework and even while at university, I was constantly involved in competitive gameplay of all kinds. When I started with school friends, I was always the weakest link. With practice I started to improve rapidly from teambuilding to turn-after-turn predictions on my opponents. Eventually I started to reach the upper echelons of play. Particularly when I started university, I was known for being brutally efficient with my matches. Matches were easy. Too easy. Over time, playing for the joy of the game was superceded by the joy of winning. By the time I had people who could give me a run for my money, I wasn't interested in competitive play anymore. It had gotten so repetitive, I felt like I was just going through the motions every battle. I had no competitive spirit left.
Enter Beastieball.
While I won't go into too much detail here to encourage you to play it for yourself, the story of Beastieball is essentially to understand why you're competing and have fun while doing it. The game does a fantastic job of attaching the player to their team too. Every beastie is comprised of a few colours, all of which are on a gradient of possible colours. This means that every beastie is ever so slightly different. They also have personalities and can form relationships with one another. Some will work together to become better as friends, while others will jeer at each other during play. This makes your team dynamic feel distinct to your gang, especially with the team names the game makes the player pick. In fact, it was so compelling to me that after the credits rolled I started to have a look at how I could prepare my team for the weekly tournaments!
Beastieball is a combination of Pokémon and volleyball. Battles are 2v2 with 3 benched beasties on each side, with 3 actions per turn and a defensive action for your opponent, such as tagging out. Critically, players take their actions at the same time but can check every move each beastie can make - meaning that neither player ever has the full picture of what their opponent is up to, but is aware of all of their options. Combined with creator Greg Lobanov's philosophy of making every beastie at least playable, almost every match is rich with deep logical and psychological gameplay decisions on a fast timer, like split-second reactions in volleyball or tennis. Each player has only 45 seconds to take their turns, which reflects the fast-paced decision making processes with real athletes in physical sports.
When a beastie loses all of its stamina, it has to stay on the bench for a few turns in order to recover. However, they will become sweaty which deals damage over time. Allowing beasties to revive should slow the game down, but in reality the tempo is drastically increased. As soon as the first point is taken from a wipe out, aggressive teams are racing against the clock to take the remaining points before the opposing defensive threats come back online. This gives the game a satisfying push-and-pull where each player is trying to push their advantage before the game itself naturally pulls them back into the neutral zone. It's similar to a fighting game, but more accessible due to the lower APM requirements. To me, the resulting experience feels like bullet chess, but the stamina bars introduce the idea of wearing down individual game pieces which creates an additional layer of long-term planning to be able to keep momentum for all 3 points that must be scored to win. It also gives some interesting debates among players about when it's the 'right' time to concede a point to avoid having too many low stamina beasties that can't receive a ball.
As soon as I got involved in my first tournament, I was genuinely blown away by the sheer level of depth in what is realistically a very simple system in practice. The online community was extremely friendly and welcoming too, so it wasn't long before I was hooked hard. The number of possible teams within each archetype of play