Pokémon Trading Card Game Lookback Review

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is a classic TCG from way back when and it’s still going strong today.

I haven’t played it for ages, but I’m going to give you my thoughts about it now.

Each player plays the role of a Pokémon trainer that use their Pokémon creatures to battle the opposing trainer.

Pokémon TCG Game Play

All you need here is a deck of 60 cards and something to mark damage on your Pokemon. Players shuffle their deck and draw 7 cards and can redraw if they don’t have any basic Pokemon in their hand but I’m not going into THAT much detail in this post.

Players choose a basic Pokemon from their hand as their “Active Pokemon” face down. Then they pick up to 5 basic Pokemon to put on their bench face down, behind the active one.

The next 6 cards in the deck are laid out as prizes off to one side, face down.

Choose a random start player, all players flip their active Pokemon and bench face up.

Players take turns playing a full round which is divided in 4 phases:

1 – Draw a Card

Erm… Draw a card…

2 – Main Phase

This is where you do all of the things including:

Add a basic Pokémon to the bench. There is a limit of 5 here so you need to have space.

Evolve a Pokémon you have in play by playing the next evolution on top of that card. For example, you can put a Charmeleon card on Charmander, then later Charizard on Charmeleon.

Attach an Energy card to a Pokémon. These are the cards you use to activate their abilities and attack.

Play a Trainer card and discard it. These all have many different abilities including drawing cards, healing damage and much more, too much to list here.

Switch the active Pokémon with one from the bench by discarding energy cards from the active Pokémon equal to their printed retreat cost. The switched out Pokémon has all their damage counters and status effects removed.

Use the power of the active Pokémon by just doing what it says!

3 – Attack Phase

You can attack your opponents active (defending) Pokémon with one of your active Pokémons attacks. Each of the Pokémons attacks will have an energy requirement so that many of the correct energy cards need to be equipped.

Follow the instructions on the attack and put damage on the defender. Double the damage if the defender is weak to the attack’s type and reduce the damage if they are resistant to it.

Some attacks and effects add a status to the defending Pokémon:

Status Effects

Asleep – Can’t attack or retreat. Flip a coin at the end of each turn to see if they wake up.

Confused – Card is turned upsidedown and can only retreat or attack on a correct coin flip. A failed coin flip sees the Pokémon attack itself for 20 damage!

Paralyzed – Card is turned sideways and can’t attack or retreat until the end of that players turn.

Poison – Add a poison counter, that Pokémon takes 10 damage at the end of a players turn.

A Pokémon that takes damage equal to its health value is knocked out. Discard it and all attached cards and replace it with one from the bench.

The attacking player picks one of their prize cards at random and puts it in their hand.

4 – End Phase

There are some actions to do here on some cards, but mostly it just ends your turn and now your opponent takes a turn.

There are 3 ways a player can win a game:

• Claim all 6 of your Prizes
• If your opponent runs out of Pokémon in play
• If your opponent can not draw a card from their deck

Theme

I love the cartoon and video games. I played the originals on the Gameboy and I’m still playing Pokémon Shield on the Nintendo Switch today. Back in the day I also enjoyed the CCG Gameboy game which was really good fun!

This card game has the 1v1 trainer fighting which makes thematic sense to me.

Setup & Rulebook

Like any CCG this is fine. You have to layout your prizes AFTER you draw your hand of cards, not before. It’s all random so it doesn’t matter but still, rules are rules!

The rulebook is pretty good but as I’d already played several similar games that make it easier to understand.

Components & Artwork

The cards are standard quality really. I think Wizards of the Coast printed this in the beginning so they already had a style to follow.

It would be hard to get the art wrong when they have a massive catalogue of cartoon images to pull from. The art is great and makes all the Pokémon and accessories look really good.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

As with all CCGs, or even card games you can play with hands face up and/or build a nice simple deck with easy to use cards.

This is more accessible than most CCGs so you should be good, it was designed with kids in mind after all.

Pokémon Trading Card Game Summary

I didn’t play this game as much as I played Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer CCG but I do really enjoy it.

When it came out the cartoon was on daily and we were all still playing the original Nintendo game. I was watching the cartoon and playing the card game with my nephews, and we had some really good times collecting, trading and playing this game and trying new things.

You can have good fun deck building. You have the Grass, Electric, Water, Fighting, Fire and Psychic energies and can build decks around these and any combinations of them.

Then you can use your fave Pokémon and their evolutions or pick the best ones for your strategy. I like Pikachu, but I never really got my electric deck to spark with them in it.

My Psychic deck that forces your opponents to draw cards to run their deck out is my favourite! Mr Mime for the win!

So, even though this game is 24 years old and I haven’t played it for at least 22 years I still have fond memories of it. I still have 4 decks from the first few sets and I’d be willing to play it again.

Jesta ThaRogue