TOAny millennial (and any parent) will be familiar with Pokémon cards, pillars of newsstand power since the beginning of the century. Inside shiny metallic plastic packaging are trading cards adorned with creatures of varying rarity, from a humble Squirtle to a special edition illustrated Snorlax. There have been a few attempts to bring these lucrative illustrated cards (and the competitive battle game you can play with them) to smartphones, but so far, they’ve all been poorly received. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, released last week, is by far the best one yet. It really hooked me.
Here, for the first time since the Pokémon Trading Card Game on Game Boy Color in 1998, we have a decent virtual version of the incredibly popular card game. This is good news, because it is very entertaining, but also bad news. news, because it is worryingly compelling. I’ve played at least a couple of hours every day this week, although I’m starting to run out of things to do. I probably won’t let my kids play it, because if the prospect of shiny Charizards leaves me so helpless, surely they’ll have no hope.
Like real cards, the appeal of this game revolves around the minuscule chance that a given pack contains something super rare. Tap a booster pack adorned with Mewtwo, Pikachu, or Charizard and you’ll be greeted with a glittering carousel of shiny packs to choose from and open with a swipe of your finger. The virtual cards are presented beautifully; A nice touch is that you can turn a pack over before opening it so the cards are revealed upside down, extending that little moment of suspense before you see what they are. The rarest ones sparkle and sparkle when you tilt the screen to admire them. Get a really rare card, as I discovered this morning, and you’ll get a complete animated mini-movie of the scene depicted on it.
The game gives you a free booster pack every 12 hours. A £7.99 monthly subscription gets you another daily pack and you can play battles or pay money to win more, but only up to a point. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket isn’t bad: it doesn’t force you to pay to spend time on it. The limit on the number of packages you can open each day is an effective brake on the random reward aspect of the dopamine pumping game.
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Meanwhile, if you want to deploy your cards in battles, you can do so as many times as you want for free. More than a simulation of collecting real Pokémon cards, it is a simulation of fighting with them, something that surprisingly few card collecting kids do. The rules of these battles are the same as the real-life card game, but simplified. You build a deck of 20 cards of different Pokémon and useful item cards, such as Potions to heal damage and Poké Balls to recover creatures from your deck. Each turn you generate energy, which you can attach to Pokémon to power their attacks. A good deck consists of one or two really powerful Pokémon and then a small phalanx of other creatures and cards that complement their abilities. Fundamentally, it is No about who has the rarest and most striking Pokémon card. A great strategic deck can be created from relatively common cards, if you think about it carefully.
I quickly got a feel for how my decks worked after a couple of battles, making small adjustments between each match. It’s not as good (or as deep) as the real card game, but this quick version is much better suited to playing on a phone. It’s still engaging and moderately challenging, especially against other human players, but also intuitive. That No Intuitive are all the different currencies and items you earn in these battles. I’ve spent more time trying to figure out what they’re used for than arguing with the makeup of my decks. You’ll be constantly rewarded with gold, glowing dust, tickets, and hourglasses with every small collection milestone or battle you reach.
This is the worst of the shadow of the free game in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Overall, however, it doesn’t seem overly manipulative, and certainly no more so than the actual letters, which after all always costs money; It scares me to think how much my family has spent on them over the years. It’s not as generous as Pokémon Go with the amount of things you can do without opening your wallet, but for me the monetization doesn’t get in the way of the fun. However, he has apparently already earned a staggering $24 million.
The 226 different cards on offer right now are cleverly oriented towards Pokémon’s peak millennial nostalgia years of the early 2000s; Trading Card Game Pocket is very tempting for those of us who are part of the original generation of Pokémaniacs. Like Pokémon Go, that selection will expand over time and I hope I eventually tire of it. For now, however, I’m enjoying this daily treat.