Hits & Outs
- Board's Eye View
- Jan 2
- 2 min read
You'd be forgiven for thinking that Itten's Hits & Outs is a baseball game. It has a baseball theme, with a small baseball diamond board and baseball batter, pitcher and runner meeples, and it comes with a screen that doubles as a scoreboard for each team's innings at the bat. Despite this, Hits & Outs isn't a sports game. It doesn't in any meaningful sense simulate baseball in board game form. Rather, Hits & Outs is a filler-length two-player bluffing and guessing game kitted out in baseball uniform.
The game is played over three 'innings' where both players gets to bat and pitch. The pitcher player has four tokens, three of which denote misses and one is a hit. They conceal the tokens under covers and place one out at each of the four bases on the tiny baseball diamond board. The batter is trying to guess where the pitcher has placed the hit token. The cover at that base is removed and the token revealed. If it's a miss, the batter flips an out token and tries again. When three out tokens are flipped, their innings ends. When the batter correctly guesses the hit token, they place one of their runners at that base. The pitcher hides all the tokens again and runners advance on any subsequent hits. You can optionally add a rule where the batter automatically scores a Home Run if they correctly call their hit on their first attempt.
That's really the entire game in a nutshell. It's entirely about players bluffing, guessing and second-guessing each other. The game reminds us of 'Find the Lady' or the shell game but without a huckster's sleight of hand. It makes for a fun filler than you can play in just 10 minutes. Just don't expect to be recreating the World Series.
