TCGs of Old

Looking Back at Old TCG's

Upon getting older and getting the amazing thing known as “Adult Money”. I find myself dipping back into some of the old TCG and CCG’s that I either never got a chance to play back when I was young or that I just could not afford or, or that i didn’t even know existed.

So I went on an internet hunting spree to find some old starter sets that I could grab and have a play around with. Now starter sets are fine with me, as if you listen to the podcast you will know how I feel about organised play. But, if you do not listen to the podcast, firstly shame on you, click the podcast tab above or head to youtube to view all our podcasts. I’m not a massive fan of sitting in a room that normally does not contain any windows and usually contains a large group of people, some of which don’t understand the basics of higen and the others are just WAY to into the card game and ruin the fun for every one. So long winded way of saying that starter sets are fine by me.

So what starter set did I find? Well it took me a while to find any that where not overpriced due to everyone like me getting adult money and wanting to get the things for their childhood. So I had to head towards the lesser known card games. I got myself a couple of starter sets of Spycraft, Battletech and Eve.

Spycraft CCG

So I found three starter sets for Spycraft pretty cheap. Actually they where cheaper than you can get any starter set for a modern game these days.

What is Spycraft

From the publisher’s website
Espionage is a grand shadow play in which every act is an ideological war and every actor carries the fate of nations in his armor-lined briefcase. The greatest among them are silent soldiers of private wars … wars fought behind the scenes for reasons we never truly understand. They lie, cheat, and steal to protect truth, integrity, and security. They kill to save lives. Spies specialize in treachery so no one else has to, and find honor in conviction alone.

The game plays out like you are a team of spy’s trying to wipe out an opposing team of spy’s. The theme is oozing out of this card game.

When I first got the game, like all ccgs and tcgs of the 90’s if came with a small novel for a rulebook, usually the size of a trading card. This one was not too bad though, it was actually 2 cards tall, so double the size. Made it a little easier for the aging man to read. Now this game is fantastic, lets just chuck that out there first hand. It is hard to learn though and the internet is not your friend for learning how to play. There are a coupld of very old youtube videos which are not very helpfull and there is also a livestream done by the Team Covinent guys. This one wasl helpful, but still left me with many questions as they themselves where learning how to play the game at the time the video was being recorded. But after 3 read throughs of the books I’m pretty shure I got the rules down in my head, the next challange was convaying the rules to my opponent. This took a couple of goes to get, but we got their.

Basicly each player starts the game with 4 spy’s at their disposal. Each better than the last. You start with the weekest one face up and as the game goes on you will pay to flip your better ones, each time making them your new leader.

Now as this is a card game about spy’s everything you do with your cards is done facedown, playing a spy. Facedown. Adding equipment to that spy. Facedown. Its not till you wend your spies onto a mission and you want them to interact with that mission do they flip over and reveal themselves and their equipment to your opponent.

This is a great fun game and I really enjoyed it a lot. It took a while to get into, but once your there it is well worth it. If you can find yourself a couple of starter deck or some Print and Play files of it, give it a go. It’s well worth it, and I hope that anouther company picks up the system and gives it a rebirth like alot of games are getting these days.

Battletech TCG

Mechs in card from

Set in the Battletech universe, this collectible card game has each player customizing her deck with mechs, vehicles, 5 types of resources, and characters and locations from the BT universe. Play is similar to magic – draw a card, play cards, tap resources and build. Players play resources which they tap to build their units. Once built, units attack the opponents units, resources, or deck. Each point of damage to the deck scraps a card from it. Once a player’s deck runs out of cards, he loses the game.

(Description from BGG)

Now this one is a very interesting one. It is designed by the godfather of TCG’s Richard garfield. You may know him from his first little game MAGIC THE GATHERING. This has a very interesting mechanic for the resources. Mechs all come into play face down and you have to essentially build them, spending your resources each turn to place markers on a mech. Once that mech has enough markers it can deply and punch up all the other mechs.

One of the interesting things about the starter sets that i got are that they where random. Both of the decks I purchased where different, identical boxes, but different cards. I loved that. There was nothing really ground breaking in the game, but it was just a good fun time. If you want to find proxy images you can head to this website. Print some cards of and start playing.

Eve: The second Genesis

Space mining card game

Each player begins play with a starbase, located in their home region. Initially, this home region is the only source of ISK, which is the currency in the Eve universe. By playing cards from their hand, each card usually costing a certain amount of ISK, the player can do the following:

build up their home region, strengthening their starbase or increasing its ISK generation capacity
build ships
explore outer regions
cause events to occur using “news” cards

The player can also deploy their ships to defend outer regions, thus gaining ISK or other benefits from the region. Of course, a player can also deploy their ships into their opponent’s home region, in an attempt to destroy their starbase. Victory is normally decided when only one starbase remains, or if a player runs out of cards in their draw deck.

(From Wiki)

This one is a different card game and I love it. The coolest thing about this game is that when you places a ship it has a build time. That is depicted by text on the side of the card, and when you rotate the card 90 degrees it changes that text eg build 2, build 1 etc. Once its built it can fly out to the location cards and collect all the mining goodness and also punch the opponents ships. So much fun. Its a little more of a boardgame / tcg but still real amounts of fun and really feels like your playing Eve. Also each starter deck was a 2 player starter deck which is also somthing very very nice and tcg’s need to go back to doing that.

Looking Back at Old TCG's