Back in the 90s after Magic: The Gathering took off and people were playing in every class, on park benches and in movie lines. Magic was popular, very popular. Even the “cool” kids at my middle school (and later high school) played the game … so, I refused to play.
Instead I went for the not mainstream games … which meant I was the only one in town with a deck and therefore never actually took part in the TCG game boom of the 90s despite drowning at least a year’s worth of allowance and snow shoveling money into it.
Ani-Mayham
First up was Ani-Mayham. damn near 20 years later and I STILL can’t figure out this game. It was, however, the only one that other people had. By other people I mean the secret society of anime geeks that my school supported (and was accidentally founded by me and my love of Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi). Given that the three of us that had decks could never figure it out the game basically became baseball card-like collecting and showing off instead of playing. My big thing was trying to get all the Ranma 1/2 cards and lamenting that there were no Sailor Moon expansion packs.
From what I understand there is still a Convention community for this game at the various anime conventions. However, since I’ll never attend an anime convention (Baltimore will forever be a bad memory for me) my deck will forever sit un-used.
The rules that we had can be found here. If anyone can figure them out all I can say is “ALL GLORY TO YOU CARD MASTER!”
Jyhad (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle)
Produced by Wizards of the Coast this was a card game adaption of White Wolf’s “Vampire: The Masquerade”. I had both the Jyhad and Vampire versions of this one and like Ani-Mayham it lay complete un-used. Different from Ani-Mayham, however, was that I actually understood the rules to this one. I really liked the pool system as it really made the player have to think … but again, I had no one to play with and this game had an amazing group atmosphere to it. From what I understand Vampire: TES is still alive and kicking with new expansions and rules updates as recent as 2013 and to be honest if they had an online system like “Duel of the Planeswalkers” I would probably be all over it.
There were others as well, but these two remain the ones I still own and can easily remember the rules of. There was a Highlander one that was basically card sword fights and a Star Trek one that I remember not at all … in the end I finally jumped on board with Magic in 2000 only to find that no one in the Army apparently played it … damn it!
