Pokémon

A couple of weeks ago, one of Calfgrit7’s friends at school gave him two cards from the Pokémon trading card game. Then last week, the friend gave him two more. Calfgrit7 loves the cards, and he’s taken them everywhere with him for several days. He’s read the text on the cards and inspected the pictures of the Pokémons on the cards, and is just totally thrilled with them.

He let me look at the cards, too, and such is my curse that I noticed editing errors on a couple of them immediately. “Attack” instead of “attach”, and something else I can’t remember right now.

I’ve heard of the game, and over the years I’ve seen kids playing it, but I’ve never so much as looked at the cards, myself. I used to collect and play the Magic: the Gathering trading card game back in the 90s — I eventually sold most of my valuable rare cards for hundreds of dollars profit, which I turned around and “invested” in other games to play — so I understand the kind of game and its appeal. I thought Calfgrit7’s interest in the cards might be a good reason to look into the game. Maybe he and I could play it together.

I stopped by Target and picked up a couple of pre-packaged Pokémon decks, (from the Diamond & Pearl, Great Encounters expansion, if you are familiar with the game). CG7 was very excited to get a whole deck (60 cards), and when we opened them, he dug right into the cards. I skimmed through my cards to get an idea of what the theme looked like, and then went right into the basic instructions.

The basic concept seems like a fairly simple game but there are a few vague and confusing rules. I’ll talk about playing the game in an upcoming post.

As for the cards themselves, they were a big hit with Calfgrit7, and with Calfgrit3, too. CG3 wanted to look at them, and asked questions about them so much that I went out and bought a booster pack (10 cards) for him. He spread them all out on his little bench on the back patio and looked at each one. Sitting on the potty before bed time, CG3 held his cards and sang, “Pokémon, Pokémon, Pokémon . . .”

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com