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Baseball fans looking to dive deeper into their favorite team or take on a diversion from the current state of play — oh, hey Mariners — have a new Seattle-made online trivia/puzzle game worth checking out.
“Daily Walkoff” launched last week and serves as a daily history and stats challenge for fans of all 30 Major League Baseball teams.
Each puzzle features the names of 12 players spread across four columns. Similar to The New York Times game “Connections,” you have to move players into the columns where they relate to one another. Get three players correct in one column, and you get a hit; get one wrong and it’s an out. The goal is to get all four columns correct before you get three outs, and “walk off” to win.
Creators Eric Parker and Jacob Cook are game and baseball geeks who met at the University of Washington 12 years ago. They’re squeezing in development of “Daily Walkoff” around their day jobs — Parker helps run his own business as a Tableau trainer and consultant, and Cook is a software engineer at Levanta.
The game has emerged just as the baseball season is winding down. In Seattle, the home team has lost four straight games as of Wednesday morning and is in danger of missing the playoffs.
“At the moment, it’s a fun distraction from how miserable the Mariners are,” Parker laughed.
There are plenty of other sports and baseball-related games out there, such as “MLB Pickle” and “Immaculate Grid.” Parker said “Daily Walkoff” is unique in its ability to allow players to select any team and take guesses at the “questions” related specifically to that team.
“Daily Walkoff” relies on a publicly available baseball data set, and the columns are generated nightly, quizzing players on MLB batting averages from a specific year, starting pitchers, wins and losses, home countries and much much more.
“No other game is attempting to do this because of the complexity in coding and modeling it requires,” Parker said.
Parker said Cook is a “pretty technical guy” who previously built a successful puzzle game in high school called “Squarescape.” The two both play daily games such as “Wordle” and figured a game catered to casual baseball fans could be another hit. “Daily Walkoff” attracted more than 1,300 unique users in the first couple days after going live.
Parker said he and Cook are learning as they go. There’s no real plan to make money off their creation, and if Big League Chew or somebody wanted to sponsor the game, that would be great. Or if someone else wants to pay them to make it, or buy it, even better.
“We’re nerds,” Parker said. “We enjoy the challenge and the fun of the creation of it. But also we’re realists, in the sense that our wives and kids probably want more of us back at some point.”
