The surreal baseball horror game Blaseball has finally returned, entering its prologue this week ahead of a brand-new Era. The browser game premiered in 2020, and soon revealed itself to be much more than a simple sports simulator - the fictional team players of Blaseball have battled a peanut god, faced weather conditions like Birds and Blooddrain, and the last Era culminated in every team being sucked into a black hole. Now, after over a year, players will finally begin entering a new universe during an event called Fall Ball.

Some of Blaseball's mechanics function very similarly to other fantasy sports, with players picking teams and placing bets. However, players can also participate in voting for Decrees - rule changes which in the past have been things like "Open the Forbidden Book" and "Eat the Rich" - and Blessings, which provide boosts to select players like "Fireproof Jacket," which protects them from incineration - a fairly common event in Blaseball. The new Fall Ball prologue is the precursor to a new Era, where players will begin dropping out of the black hole, and fans can win rewards for virtually attending. There's also a new Blaseball app in development, although there's no set release just yet.

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Screen Rant sat down with Lead Game Designer Joel Clark and Founder and Creative Director Sam Rosenthal to discuss bringing back the surreal horror of Blaseball, the game's new app, and what players can look forward to in the new Era.

I am so excited for Blaseball to return, and I feel like it couldn't be a better time for a horror baseball game. It's coming up on Halloween, and it's the postseason right now. Is there anything especially horror-filled or spooky that fans can expect in the new season?

Sam Rosenthal: Something that was tied pretty closely with the spooky season coming up is our prologue event, which is called Fall Ball. The universe is being rebuilt and players are falling from a black hole onto teams, so it's a great opportunity to watch the teams get constructed together. It's a good way for new fans to jump into all this madness, and for the old fans to see all their favorite players too. That's one new thing that's coming up very soon.

With this sort of revival, will the roster be mostly the same, or will it be a completely different experience with players?

Joel Clark: That's some of the horror. The main teams will be back, but which players will be back? I don't know, we might be sitting there during Fall Ball, wondering if we'll see some of our fan favorites again.

Can you talk a little more about making Blaseball accessible for new players? There's so much lore and different mechanics.

Sam Rosenthal: Yeah, this is a huge focus for this revival of Blaseball for us. One of the reasons that we've been taking a little longer on it is because we really want to get this right. There's a lot of attempts at solving that problem in different ways. One, and it's a very obvious one, we're going to have a big tutorial of the game to teach people how to play. We've never had one before; you typically would have to just jump in and ask people. No more of that. Really excited for that.

Another thing that's very different about this one is how we're actually telling the story. The structure is different, too. In the past, we would have this one continuous story. If you jumped in on week four, there was so much to catch up on. You'd have to be like, "Hey, who is this peanut that's talking for us? Why is this player dead? What's going on here?"

Now, we have a new monster every single week, so we've got a new terror to rally against. They're gonna have their own special game mechanics and their own theme, so every season will feel pretty different. There's a starting point for brand new players, over and over again. Of course, we're still paying off came before, and there's still going to be big climactic stuff. So, if you stick around, there's a good reason to, but we want to make it really easy to jump in at any point.

Then the last part of all this is that we have looked a lot at how the community has organized and come together outside of Blaseball, whether it's on Twitter or on Discord. We said, "Okay, how do we bring that more into the game?" so that when you jump in, it doesn't feel like this very isolated experience. You have ways to jump in with people and talk about what's going on. That's such a great way to learn what Blaseball is and participate in it. We've taken what we really liked about those different platforms and built something that was a little bit more custom to what Blaseball is. That's gonna be part of this launch too.

The community has always been a really big part of Blaseball, not just in terms of voting for blessings and decrees, but also making fan art and backstories and updating the wiki. Can you talk a little bit more about how fans have impacted the game over time and the influence they've had on the upcoming season?

Joel Clark: In the early going, fans were hugely impactful on the game, because we were still figuring out what Blaseball was meant to be. It was really a prototype that we launched, so as we were figuring out what the game was, fans were also steering it in their own direction. And then over time, as we've established more processes, it's become less raw and less directly collaborative in that way. But we still tried to find ways to bring fans' input in at all times.

We're definitely watching to see what fans are most interested in, in terms of systems and stories, and we try to accent those. We try to provide as many choices as possible where fans can gve input or change the direction of the game, while still steering the boat as best we can. As Sam was alluding to, we really love when fans can share things they've been working on or players they care about. And so, we've been trying to find ways for them to do that more directly.

We always want fans to be a part of Blaseball and engage with this game in a creative way.

Are there any really memorable moments from when Blaseball was first starting up, in terms of what fans were doing and how they were reacting? Any moment you realized this game is bigger than you had ever anticipated that it would be?

Sam Rosenthal: So many. I think it really first hit us when the fan art came. There's not a whole lot of art in Blaseball, so we were like, "Oh, that's interesting," People are looking at these really ridiculous names and coming up with entire visualizations for their backstories and music. It was way more than what we anticipated.

The game is designed to get people to come together to get what they want to happen. But the creativity that fans are coming up with, and the way that they would jump into the most obscure possibilities, was awesome. We knew that it was possible for them to bring a player back from the dead, and we set it up so they could do it if they wanted to. But not only did they do it, they jumped on it, and that became the focus of that season. That was so cool. It taught us that we can really run with it. We can introduce these really obscure possibilities and have the faith in our community to figure out what they can do to come up with something entirely new.

Are there any other favorite unexpected developments you guys have that you had no idea players would even try to do with Blaseball?

Joel Clarke: The other big one was the Snackrifice, where the peanut was trapping players in peanut shells. They figured out, "Well, what if we put an entire team's pitching rotation in peanut shells? Who would pitch then?" The LA Tacos did that, and it was known as the Snackrifice. That was another really big improvisational moment, but fans have surprised us at every turn.

It doesn't always break the game, as it sometimes did in the early going, but all through the expansion there were constant times of surprise. There were these really smart player steals, where you exploit a mechanic to steal another team's best player. It happened a lot in the expansion.

Blaseball PR image showing a flaming blue skull in space.

Sam, I know you've said that some of the inspiration for the game in the beginning came from how MLB sometimes was valuing money over safety. Can you talk a little bit more about how real-life baseball impacted Blaseball? Both overall and specifically from the most recent MLB season.

Sam Rosenthal: Before we made Blaseball or even started talking about making Blaseball, Joel and I went to a bunch of Dodgers games together. We'll talk about baseball and horror as it pertains to the Dodgers pretty soon, but whenever the Dodgers would start to lose, we would riff and just have fun with it.

There was one game - I think it was a postseason game, and it was shocking that the Dodgers were losing. We started to joke around a little bit, and we were like, "What if this game was different and funnier and more interesting?" We came up with ideas like, "What if players had to carry jugs of water on their heads as they're running the bases? What if there were more bases?" A lot of that obviously made its way into Blaseball.

But I think what's really interesting about baseball is that it's very slow, iterative game design. They change a couple of things every single year, and you get to see how it plays out on this really big scale. They've had the ghost runners that are still very controversial, and this year they had the new postseason format. These are, in some ways, very small changes compared to what we introduce. But it's fun to watch all the debate around them and to see the narratives that come out of them. They don't have the luxury of being able to test something out every single week.

But the dominant narrative of this postseason so far is the question of whether this new format hurt the top-seeded teams. I don't really think so, but it's a question that keeps coming up. It's fun to watch people debate that sort of stuff.

Joel Clark: Next year, there's going to be slightly bigger bases. What a huge change.

Sam Rosenthal: There's a clock next year too. That will be a pretty big change.

While watching baseball, I was thinking about the controversy with sticky stuff. That could insanely translate into Blaseball.

Sam Rosenthal: I love that. The players are touching their ears, and it's like, "What's going on there? Is there something more to it?" These are the types of speculation that baseball inspires in me.

Joel Clark: That was my favorite moment from this postseason, the Joe Musgrove wet ears controversy.

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Even though Blaseball has been on a break, there have been a lot of things that are still keeping fans engaged. There's been voting for the Blaseball Hall of Fame, and I'm curious how that came about. Have there been any unexpected votes or anything like that?

Joel Clark: It's a totally fan-driven project. They took that project themselves and have been running this vote. I've cast a few votes here and there, but I haven't been in there for every single vote. You can't expect any official Blaseball nonsense to come out of that, but it has been a really fun thing to watch.

Our community's just constantly finding things to do like that, and it's really cool. It's been a while since we've had a live season of Blaseball, and they're still finding things to do, which I think speaks a lot to our community.

And there's been an art challenge with prompts for each day in October. Was that fan-driven too, or someone on the creative team?

Sam Rosenthal: We came up with the prompts for that one, so hats off to our community team for organizing Blasetober. But the output of it is, of course, totally up to the fans.

There's also a Blaseball card game coming, which is really exciting. I know the funding for that has come to an end. Is it in the shipping phase yet?

Sam Rosenthal: Not yet. But that has been such a really cool collaboration. Wayfinder Games is a great development team, and they're Blaseball fans. They came to us and were like, "Hey, we prototyped this card game. What do you think?" And we were like, "This is awesome. Let's see if we can work together on it."

It's our first foray into the physical world, and we hope it won't be our last.

What are some of the biggest changes? Obviously, it's very different in that it's not the web page, but how did you have to adapt when making the card game?

Sam Rosenthal: Honestly, the development was really spearheaded by Wayfinder. If anything, it was more about figuring out how we can communicate what we know and love about Blaseball to another team that can then take up the creative reins on it. To make sure that it's within the same spirit, we created a collaborative process. We would love to do more things like that and find ways to work with other people outside of ourselves; to take things that we started and run with them in a different direction.

Joel Clark: I know they didn't want to just take Blaseball directly and say, "Okay, let's make some board game rules out of this." They wanted to make a good board game that was also Blaseball. They did a really good job of capturing the spirit and Blaseball, with a lot of the familiar faces and some of the mechanics, but making it its own totally different thing that works in its own right.

In terms of the upcoming season, there's so much that's secret still. But you spoke a little bit about Monster of the Week. Are there other big mechanics changes players can expect from Blaseball?

Joel Clark: Yeah, there's some we can reveal and some we can't, but it's gonna feel really new. We really have redone a lot of the work from the ground up, including the core simulation that has been rebuilt. The games are still gonna look and feel very similar, but there's a whole new dimension to the game now that will make it feel a lot more in-depth and exciting. It will have more potential for weirdness and chaos.

We have reworked betting a little bit, but we've also added some other companion mechanics to bedding that we think will deepen the experience and make it a little easier to jump in and play. We can't reveal specifics on that, but we've really thought a lot about how someone can play a little bit more casually.

Sam Rosenthal: I think one thing we're talking about is that we rebuilt the simulation that powers play Blaseball. Towards the end of the expansion era, we got into the state where the way that we could come up with surprises was to add stuff to it. At some point, it was very difficult to follow when we were just adding and adding on top. You kind of need to broaden the foundation and deepen it to just expand the possibility space.

That was one of the things that took the most time with this rebuild, but we're really happy with where we got to it. I'm excited to show people. It just means that we don't have to add completely different styles of choices, although sometimes we do. But the choices can just lead to a broader set of outcomes, which we were having a hard time doing before. We kind of reached the limits of the first version of the simulation.

Image depicts when it rained pickled herring - which look like Swedish Fish - in Blaseball.

Can you reveal if the stats are the same? Has that been switched up at all?

Joel Clark: The original stats have changed. There were a lot of very cursed stats back then, so we have adjusted them. One of them is carrying through, but the rest have all changed a little bit. I think it's gonna be a fun new set. As we said, we've rebuilt the core simulation, so we've been able to rethink things like that and still keep the spirit of things.

Do you guys have teams that you're rooting for?

Sam Rosenthal: Absolutely. A lot of favoritism going on here. I'm a Crabs fan, which makes me probably the most hated member of the team by the fans. Here's hoping they win six to seven championships

Joel Clark: I'm a Kansas City Breath Mints fan.

Is there anything else that you want either returning players or new players to know about Blaseball and this new season?

Sam Rosenthal: For new players, this is a perfect place to jump in. If you've heard about Blaseball before, or you just feel like so much has happened and you can't pick it up, we've done so much work to change that. We really hope this is a more welcoming experience this time around.

At the end of the day, if you think about real sports, you can jump in midway through a season and get a quick snapshot of what's happening without knowing the entire history of the Dodgers. It might help to know that they choke every single postseason, but you can pick that up pretty quickly. We're trying to make it that sort of experience, where there's definitely a reason to keep coming back and there's a lot of continuity. But if you don't, that's fine too.

One thing we haven't talked about here is that this is coming to mobile for the first time. Bringing it to an app meant that we really wanted to make sure that the game was very easy to jump into for just a couple of minutes rather than needing it to be in a browser tab all the time.

That's awesome. Is there anything else you can reveal about the mobile app at this time?

Sam Rosenthal: Let's see. It's gonna be on iOS and Android. It'll be available at the launch of this new era, and it's kind of an extension of what we've started with the web. All of them will have parity between each other. But with mobile, it just gives us some storytelling opportunities that we didn't have before. We can send out notifications when things happen, and it's a very different style.

It's not so much like, "I'm on Twitter, and people are yelling about something that's happening in Blaseball. Let me open the tab and see what's happening." It's more like, "Here's some things that happened in the world of Blaseball when I was going about my own day." As we try to adapt our storytelling to a world where we're not all just sitting at our apartments all the time anymore, it gives us a really great avenue.

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The Blaseball Fall Ball prologue begins October 26, and can be accessed with any internet browser. The Blaseball app can be found on the App Store and Google Play Store soon, though no release date has been officially announced.