Words by Kris Petersen

When the product line for SD Gundam in the US was first shown at the Toy Fair almost two years ago, one of the first products displayed as finished was a trading card game. Bandai had had success previously with their various Digimon Card Game sets, and they even tried to make an (unsuccessful) Gundam Trading Card Game. So, when you stick Digimon and Gundam together, the closest thing to the offspring is probably SD Gundam, the main young boy's line that Bandai is currently producing. Now, with the less than stellar Gundam game that had been produced, and the rather juvenile Digimon game, how did this game make out? Well, I'll get to that later. First, I'll talk about the collectable aspect.

The game is sold in both starter sets which contain a pre-assembled deck, ready to play with out of the box. Between the two decks, you basically get the entire main cast of the show, which is good for people that want to collect the pretty pictures. You'll also get an entire first half of the set with no holes. If you put the cards in a binder by the number, you won't have any holes if you simply buy the two starters. The starters also come with small PVC figurines of the Gunperry, Gunbike, and the Dark Axis Musai cruiser, which have a part in some aspects of the game. The boosters have 10 cards per pack, and the ratio of holographic ones seems much higher than advertised. I was able to complete my set within 30 packs, which isn't very bad, and I still had plenty of duplicates to sell on eBay. This series is pretty good for collectors which is probably a good thing, as most people in the readership of this site are a bit out of the intended range.

On to the game. There are four types of cards: Superior Defender cards, which have the SD Gundams we know and love as the focal point, Weapon cards which are weapons, and Mission cards, which have a screenshot from the show on them. The game is played almost like a hybrid of a card game and board game - you place your battleships (The 3 aforementioned PVC figurines.) onto the game board, and move them towards the enemy base. Certain spaces will give you points that you can use to deploy your Superior Defender cards to attack. All in all, the game mechanics are refreshing. They're not just a modified version of Magic, and many card games tend to be. The rules are in more detail on the official site, www.sdgundamcards.com, so I won't paraphrase the entire system, but this jaded writer is a bit impressed that it manages to be a board and card game at the same time.

Two Starter Decks and two sets of Booster Packs are currently available, with more to come after the onslaught of advertising, which is targeted to begin around June. If you're interested, get in now while the cards are still cheap, and so you don't have to wrestle with 8 year olds for that last pack.