Any millennial – and any parent – will be familiar with Pokémon cards, newsagent pester-power mainstays since the turn of the century. Contained within shiny metallic plastic packaging are critter-adorned trading cards 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 battling game that you can play with them) to smartphones, but until now, they’ve all been poorly received. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, released last week, is by some distance the best yet. It has truly gotten its hooks into me.
Here, for the first time since Pokémon Trading Card Game on the Game Boy Color in 1998, we have a decent virtual version of the incredibly popular card game. This is good news, because it’s very entertaining, but also bad news, because it is worrisomely compelling. I’ve played for at least couple of hours every day this week, though I’m starting to run out of things to do now. I probably won’t let my children play it, because if I am rendered this powerless by the prospect of shiny Charizards, they surely have no hope.
Just like the real cards, this game’s appeal revolves around the minuscule chance that any given pack might contain something super rare. Tap on a booster pack adorned with Mewtwo, Pikachu or Charizard, and you’re given a shimmering carousel of shiny packets to choose from and rip open with a swipe of your finger. The virtual cards are presented beautifully; in a nice touch, you can flip a pack over before opening it so that the cards are revealed back to front, extending that little moment of suspense before you see what they are. Rare ones sparkle and shine as you tilt the screen to admire them. Get a really rare card, as I discovered this morning, and you get a whole mini-movie animation of the scene depicted upon it.
The game gives you one booster pack for free every 12 hours. A £7.99 monthly subscription gets you another daily pack, and you can play battles or pay money to earn more, but only up to a point. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is not evil: it doesn’t force you towards paying to spend time on it. The limit on the number of packs you can open every day is an effective brake on the dopamine-mining randomised-reward aspect of the game.
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If you want to deploy your cards in battles, meanwhile, you can do that as much and as often as you want for free. More than a simulation of collecting real Pokémon cards, this is a simulation of battling with them, something that surprisingly few card-collecting kids actually do. The rules of these battles are just the same as the real-life card game, but simplified. You build a deck of 20 cards from different Pokémon and helpful item cards, such as Potions to heal damage and Poké Balls to retrieve creatures from your deck. Each turn you generate energy, which you can attach to Pokémon to power their attacks. A good deck comprises one or two really powerful Pokémon and then a small phalanx of other creatures and cards that complement its abilities. Crucially, it’s not just about who’s got the rarest, flashiest Pokémon card. A great strategic deck can be made out of relatively common cards, if you think it through carefully.
I quickly got a feel for how my decks were working 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 quickfire 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. What’s not intuitive are all the different currencies and items that you win in these battles. I’ve spent more time trying to figure out what they’re used for than I have wrangling with the makeup of my decks. You’re rewarded constantly with gold, sparkly dust, tickets and hourglasses with every tiny collecting or battling milestone you reach.
This is the worst of the free-to-play shadiness in Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Overall, however, it does not feel excessively manipulative, and certainly not more so than the actual cards, which after all always cost money; I dread 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 stuff you can do without opening your wallet, but for me the monetisation doesn’t get in the way of the fun. Nonetheless, it has apparently already made a rather astonishing $24m.
The 226 different cards on offer right now are cannily oriented towards the peak millennial nostalgia years of Pokémon in the early 00s; Trading Card Game Pocket is very tempting for those of us who were part of the original generation of Pokémaniacs. Like Pokémon Go, that selection will expand over time, and I expect I’ll get tired of it eventually. For now, though, I am enjoying this daily indulgence.