Again, it’s been a while so let’s bring you up to date with what this is. I’m listing as best I can from memory, in the general sort of order that I played them, all the RPGs, wargames, CCGs, fantasy boardgames and associated nonsense that I have ever played. All to come to the conclusion that Call of Cthulhu is the best RPG ever printed.
Last time I talked about the second worst CCG I played, so lets skip ahead a few games and get into what is the worst CCG I played, possibly the worst game outright.
Summer 1996, and I am getting into my first flush of anime fandom. I’m at the second convention I’ve ever attended, Minami Con 2 in Portsmouth, and there’s an official anime CCG on sale. What’s more it has characters from three shows I was into in a big way at this point – Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard and Ranma 1/2. Plus, the other show it drew from was Bubblegum Crisis, and everybody seemed to have good things to say about that, so this could be a way to get into that fandom too. Two of my interests had collided, it was a dream come true.
I was super excited so grabbed a deck (possibly two?) and couldn’t wait to get back home to force someone to play it. I cracked open the deck and the production value was quite high, nice looking cards with colourful art from the shows. What’s more, you could play this as a solitaire game, so I didn’t even have to wait to get home to play it. This was going to be great!
Except… the rules made no goddamn sense.
A few months later, I was back at university, where we finally had access to the World Wide Web. Excellent, I thought, I can get some errata for that dumb anime CCG I bought in the summer and finally play it properly.
The errata did not help matters all that much. They may have been longer than the original rules. Never a good sign.
Eventually they put out a second set with new rules and characters from Armitage III, Dominion Tank Police, Phantom Quest Corp., Project A-Ko, and Oh My Goddess. I’d been here before though with Spellfire, and so I abandoned Ani-Mayhem as a bad idea. I don’t think I even noticed when they released a Dragonball Z set as the games death rattle.
I’m sure there were even worse, even less popular CCGs, in fact the next few I’ll be talking about never set the world on fire either, but Ani-Mayhem was the dirt worst for me. On the plus side though, at least it was so bad I never bought any booster packs and so saved my money.