Topic: The Pokemon Trading Card Game is my guilty secret

I am a 33-year-old man who today purchased a pack of Pokemon cards. Well, a deck and three booster packs. Never really liked the video games, to be honest.

Friend of mine bought me a "training pack" for Xmas that gives you enough cards for two players to learn how to play, and gives you step-by-step rules for each deck. Purchased for me based on the fact that any time we're in a store and I see Pokemon cards anywhere, I bellow "MATE! WE COULD BUY POKEYMANS CARDS AND LEARN TO PLAY AND DO SWAPS AND FINGS" and "I WANT SOME OF THEM BECAUSE I HOPE I GET A SHINY" embarrassingly loud. (Mainly because I think I'm funny.)

Anyway...we sat and sort of learned to play on Saturday night and I was really surprised at how tactical it is. It's ludicrously tactical building a deck before a game as there could literally be trillions of combinations, and the game itself is really challenging if you're against someone who's quite good at it. I had no idea it was that in-depth, if I'm honest. The online rulebook is quite hefty, too. I figured it was a kids' game and that the focus would be more on collecting than the actual game mechanic, but I was really wrong about both. It's a darn sight more difficult than chess, in my eyes (though I'm rubbish at chess.)

Even installed the online version on my iPad and it's really well done.

So, this is my guilty secret. I appear to like playing the Pokemon Trading Card Game.

Anyone else play? Or do you have any equally guilty secrets?

I have one piece of advice, The Pokemon Trading Card Game (Gameboy Color) that was recently added to the 3DS e-shop catalogue. That bad boy contains every card released when it was the biggest thing on the planet (the first three sets, I believe) as well as promo cards (Japanese, magazine and movie attendance based) that I only drooled about beforehand.

It really "captures" (ha.. haha) the feel of opening a new pack and seeing how you can augment your decks. I played from the time that game released to the time my Gameboy tragically fell into a lake while fishing.

EDIT: A "shiny" usually is used in reference to the 1/1200 chance of wildly encountering a rare and oddly colored poke in the newer games, holographic or a "holo", is more appropriate to the TCG. This isn't also my own guilty pleasure, I swear that an "Ancient Mew", eight badges from the league competitions and the entire "Southern Islands" set in both Japanese and English aren't adorning my wall... honestly.

My daughter loves the game.............Course, shes 14.

As you were!

Yeah, the "shiny" reference is more of a UK thing. Football (soccer) stickers used to be huge over here, and you'd always get stickers of all the players on a team, then the club logo or kit or something as a foil card. Always called a shiny in Britain, no matter what the technical term is.