Winter has arrived in Canada. Snow blankets the ballparks, the crack of the bat fades into memory, and the long wait until Spring Training begins. But for us at Pocho & Papa, baseball never really ends—it just moves indoors, to our kitchen table, where dice roll and cards shuffle and the game we love comes alive in a different way.
A Family Tradition, Three Generations Deep
Baseball isn’t just a sport in our family—it’s woven into our story. My grandfather played. My father played. Together, they won a national championship when my father was just a kid, a moment of glory that became part of our family legend. That tradition didn’t stop with them. My son has carried it forward, bringing home his own championship from local little league, adding another chapter to a story that spans decades.
When we create baseball games at Pocho & Papa, we’re not just designing mechanics and testing probabilities. We’re honoring that lineage. Every roll of the dice carries the weight of those memories, those victories, those long afternoons watching innings unfold.
The Games of My Childhood
My earliest baseball games weren’t played on regulation diamonds with proper equipment. Outdoors, we improvised in streets and courtyards, using whatever we could find to mark the bases—a rock for first, someone’s jacket for second, a stick for third. We played with battered balls and makeshift bats, on uneven pavement that made every ground ball an adventure.
Indoors, when weather or darkness drove us inside, baseball continued in a different form. Dice became our umpires, cards became our scorecards, and a kitchen table transformed into a ballpark. We didn’t have much, but we had illusion—that magical ability of games to transport you somewhere else entirely. We had passion—the kind that makes you play outdoors until your hands are numb or roll dice indoors until it’s too dark to read the numbers.
Those makeshift games—both on cracked asphalt and around worn tables—taught me something crucial: you don’t need elaborate production or complicated rules to capture the essence of baseball. You need clever design that respects the sport’s rhythm. You need moments that feel authentic. You need that tension before a critical at-bat, that joy when a gamble pays off, that groan when your opponent turns a double play.
Those memories live in everything we create at Pocho & Papa. Our games are love letters to those courtyard afternoons and those kitchen table evenings, designed with the same spirit of illusion and passion that made us play one more inning even when dinner was getting cold.
More Than a Century of Baseball Games
We’re part of a tradition that stretches back over 100 years. Baseball board games have been capturing the sport’s magic since the earliest days of professional baseball itself. In 1930, Clifford Van Beek created National Pastime, a milestone that used dice and individualized player cards to simulate real-life statistics for the first time—suddenly, Babe Ruth could bash home runs on your tabletop just like he did at Yankee Stadium.
More recent entries like Deadball and Pocket Pennant Run offer fast-paced dice gameplay that uses real statistics and can simulate a game in about twenty minutes, with intuitive rules accessible to both die-hards and casual fans. Modern designers continue to innovate, finding new ways to capture baseball’s strategic depth while keeping games accessible and fun.
We stand on the shoulders of this history. Every baseball game designer who came before us understood the same truth: this sport deserves games that honor its complexity while remaining playable, that capture its drama without drowning players in charts and tables.
Filling the Gap
Here’s the truth that every Canadian baseball fan knows in their bones: the season is too short.
When the World Series ends in late October and the championship confetti settles, we face months of cold and silence. The fields disappear under snow. The sounds of summer—the ping of aluminum bats, the call of umpires, the chatter from the dugout—fade into winter quiet.
But baseball board games fill that gap. They keep the flame alive through the dark months. When it’s minus twenty outside and Spring Training feels impossibly far away, we can still experience that ninth-inning tension, still make those crucial managerial decisions, still feel the joy of a well-executed squeeze play.
At Pocho & Papa, we design games for those winter nights when you’re longing for baseball, but the nearest ballpark is buried under three feet of snow. We make games for fathers and sons who want to share their passion across the kitchen table. We make games that bridge the months between October and April, keeping the spirit of the game alive until the warm days return.
Simple Rules, Memorable Experiences
Our philosophy mirrors what we love most about the best baseball games throughout history: they don’t need to be complicated to be captivating. Simple dice baseball games have a rich tradition going back to the beginning of professional baseball, capturing the sport’s thrill and excitement through straightforward mechanics.
The games we create at Pocho & Papa honor this tradition. We believe in designs you can learn in minutes but want to play for years. We believe in games that create stories—the kind you’ll retell the next day, the kind that make you say “just one more game” when it’s already past bedtime.
Because at the end of the day, that’s what baseball is about. Not statistics alone, not simulation for simulation’s sake, but those moments that make you lean forward in your chair, hold your breath, and hope.
Winter may cover the ballparks with snow, but around our table, it’s always baseball season.
Pocho & Papa 