That’s right, I went on eBay and ordered a mint-condition, sealed starter deck from a 30-year-old collectible card game. to be precise. And, after consulting with some people, I tore off the plastic and played the solo mode. If you don’t want to r🍌ead the rest, I’ll just say this: SimCity: The Card Game plays far, far more like a modern computer deck ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚbuilding game than it does like a traditional CCG.

That’s probably why it failed 🤪and that’s probably why people hate it. But after some runs, I can safely🥃 say it’s somehow all at once pretty great and very bad and quite good and incredibly overwhelming. I love it and it may be one of the worst CCGs ever made.

The collectible card game fad in the early ‘90s was a wild time. Yes, yes, yes, we still have collectible card games. later made sure of that. But we now also have over three decades of experience with them. People know how to make these games bett💯er and deeper, yet still easier to play. On the other hand, a lot of colle🐻ctible card games - especially ones based on IPs - are now sterilized and standardized for competitive play, which is something I should care about but do not.

While remains great and I’ll still be a sucker any time they release something with purty, purty pictures, the game feels less weird than it did back in the day. Folks, there used to be a Magic card that let you draw from your entire Magic: The Gathering collection outside of your deck and the match. And꧂ it wasn’t part of one of their silly joke sets. Anyone born in a year starting with a ‘2’ missed so𓆉me of the goofiest crap.

Part of the ‘90s CCG trend - sort of like today - was that everyone wanted their IP to be turned into a physical card game. had a CCG. Monty Python had a CCG. had their first CCG in an etern🌊al line of CCGꦏs. You gotta remember, this was a relatively new concept.

Most of my friends were buying our Magic: The Gathering c🅷ards at sports memorabilia stores because our local comic shop didn’t carry them yet. The store was called Tom’s and Tom was not happy that his business was shifting away from the baseball cards he loved to the Magic cards he did not understand. Hell, I even remember there being low level beefs between D&D people and the upstart MTG fans.

Aไround this time, the folks at Maxis (RIP) and Mayfair Games (quasi-RIP?) decided to bring a pickaxe to the cardboard gold rush and released SimCity: The Card Game. This wasn’t a huge success. Or a small success. Or any type of success. In fact, this article might be the first time the words ‘SimCity: The Card Game’ and ‘success’ have been in the same piece of writing. Reviews weren’t great. Fans didn’t buy it. And, by some accounts, its failure heavily contributed to Mayfair Games’ financial problems, so that’s not good.

Here’s how I know that the game is and neve🎃r was popular: That 30-year-old mint condition sealed deck I bought? The one I opened? It cost $10 on eBay. I just checked and there’s another one for $14. A full box of sealed boosters cost $60. They’re putting up Beanie Babies numbers.

So. Inside the box are the cards - as you’d expect - and something I missed from the ‘90s so much: A deeply confusing, woefully under explained manual printed in s🍎ize 6 font on a booklet made of tissue paper. That alone brought back some memories. And oh boy, oh boy does it have trouble explaining the game! The manual tells you how to win and then basical♒ly leaves a series of riddles you have to figure out. You really need to sort of pick up context clues on what it means. This manual reads the way I must sound when I’m trying to explain Gloomhaven to people who have never played a board game before. At one point, there’s literally a section asking for fans to submit better ways to play.

To be fair, it is not a simple game. It’s weird as hell. In the main game, everyone plays with the same deck. So, no matter what you add or take out or min or max, it’s available to everyb💫ody. That alone might have reduced the competitive CCG aspect itself and put it more in line with modern card games like Arkham Horror: The Card Game.

Anyway, when playing with other people, your goal is to have the most money (e.g. victory points) when the game ends. When playing solo, you’re basically just doing a high score run until the deck runs out. If you do want your own deck, the manual includes an alte💟rnate mode in which you compete to build your cities up fastest. It’s kind of just solo mode but you can play disasters on each other. So, I guess that’s an option. I doubt anyone will want to try tha🌸t with me. And it would need far more space than my apartment.

And, look, these cards are confusing! Almost every card has roads, railroads, electrical lines, four poorly-explained stats, score adjustments, and two different color codings for what era you can build something and what zone it’s part of.ꩵ There are also politicians and disasters with their own effects and contribute to voting on city🐽 changes.

It’s a lot to keep track of. Which is especially funny because൩ every card has the most ridiculous ‘90s-era photographic art work for everything. It’s kind of quaint and charming, a style you see less in physical games these days. Seriously! Check out this a-hole𝕴 corrupt politician! What a d-bag! F him.

Here’s the problem with playing this game: keeping track of everything is a nightmare. The booklet helpfully suggests you keep a pen and paper ready. No. You need a full notebook, because everything has stats that affect everything else. Advancing between phases allows you to build more valuable areas, but that itself is weird. To advance from Phase I to Phase II, you need a certain amount of Sims. To advance from Phase II to Phase III, you need a certain amount of cards with jobs for Sims. To advance from Phase III to Phase IV, you basically need t🎉o do college calculus to figure out whether you can build a video store.

Oh, and the manual - again - actually outright says that if you’re having trouble moving between phases with the starter deck, you should just buy more boosters. It’s a hilariously blatant a-hole d-bag move. If that wasn’t confusing enough, the game also has special long cards. But I don’t own any of them, and I would have no place to store them since they appear to be shaped like bookmarks. Wait. Books! I could keep them in books.💙 Good call.

So why do I love this game? On the shallow end of the pool, the cards are nice to look at. It’s stupid, but I like it. Honestly, these would be great if I were ever running a tabletop RPG that took place in a modern city. The way the cards lay out absolutely eats up any table space possible, but could also make a great little city map to move minis between. Or, I could turn this into a suburban tarot deck with the attorney’s offi♛ce representing oncoming troubles. I know that’s me making my own fun out♏side of the game’s rules, but Mayfair told me to in a manual printed 30 years ago. Maybe I’ll go back in time and write a letter to them by hand like it’s the Civil War.

The better reason I like this game is because it plays far less like a ‘90s CCG and much more like a modern deck-building video game. If the same rules of SimCity: The Card Game were accurately converted into a digital game on Steam, it would be so much more fun. Hell, it would work well! My main issue with this game is that it’s very, very hard to keep track of everything and what rules trigger when, which makes you less of a mꦗayor and more of a city comptroller.♊ The constant counting makes it boring.

The mechanics themselves aren’t terrible - they’re just super poorly explained and eventually require keeping a list of three or four different numbers while monitoring dozens of cards. And, as I mentioned, the game is played by laying a standard𒁏-sized card next to other standard-sized cards - so you run out of table space FAST. Playing on the floor is easier, which you will find out far too late.

This game would be so good on a PC. If there were a digital version of SimCity: The Card Game that handled all the math, it would be one of my ideal games to kill a few minuteꩲs. An instant SimCity. I want a computer version that keeps all the real photos and the look of the cards - but does the heavy lifting of telling me if the crime rate at the frat house reduces the range of the police station giving me a bonus. I don’t have to flip through a microscopic manual three times to figure out if I’m calculating my Jobs-to-Sims ratio correctly.

This game would be amazing - for me, a dummy - if I could just strategize based on the cards themselves and not suffer in silence every turn as I calculate bonuses and penalties from nearby fire stations, police stations, parking lots, power plants, zoning groups, and complexes. I want to repeat that: every turn. It’s a lot. With each player a🦂nd with each card, theꦐ math increases exponentially. But it works well enough solo.

I know I’m the only person asking for this. Nobody but me likes this game. On the list of GOAT card games, SimCity ranks ꦫsomewhere between Transformers 3D Battle Card Game and Babylon 5: The Card Game. It ain’t great. That said, I don’t care. I spent $10 for this deck. And I’d gladly spend as much as $1🐈1 for this game to come back in a digital format. God, I miss when games were weird and broken and we didn’t know it.