Redditor one23abc and his little brother couldn’t afford card games like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh when they were younger, so they made their own, and it’s wonderful.
Creature Cards is around 300 glorious hand-drawn examples of the power of children’s imagination. When I was a kid I used to build chess boards out of sticks and rocks. This is an entirely new level.
one23abc outlines the creation of the cards, the rules play (as he remembers them from a decade ago) and demonstrates how his handwriting and artistic skills haven’t change one bit over the years over in his epic Reddit thread.
Here are some of my favourite cards:
He was 10. It was a valiant try.
The most powerful card in the set, a “manafestation of all darkness.”
The amount of thought that went into these is outstanding.
Check out more of the brothers’ work in galleries here and here, and think of them if you ever find yourself too broke to have fun.
Comments
7 responses to “Brothers Couldn’t Afford Pokemon Cards, So They Made Their Own Game”
That’s great, really detailed stuff for 10 years old. My primary school started a gumnut economy at some stage and me and some friends started the first casino and bank, eventually ending up with a stash of gumnuts so big we broke the economy when the stash inexplicably started attracting spiders and no one wanted to accept our money. We learned the value of sealed containers too late and the practice of using gumnuts for money was banned once the teachers heard of the spider infestation we had managed to cultivate, but for a week or 2 we had a monopoly over an entire currency, a feat that felt like a big deal at the time.
Funny enough i did this too back when the first Pokemon cards were released back when i was in year 4, my parents would not buy me any. I think i guilted them into getting me some eventually though after i started making my own.
Haha, I love this kind of thing. I did something similar except for video games because my mother didn’t want to get me a console when I was like 5 or something. I basically drew entire imaginary video game levels on a long sheet of paper and drew in enemies and then drew in my character fighting through it haha.
Whoa! I was about to write something very similar. When I was young my family was very poor and I didn’t have a lot of money for the old arcade games and I was a Ninja Turtles fanatic. So I’d watch the older kids play and memorise the whole game and drew it all out on long sheets of butcher paper complete with all of the enemies and I made my own turtles to walk through the level and beat it all.
That’s awesome, really cool to see other people have done similar things 🙂
I almost miss being a 5 year old! These days I feel like my brain’s crusty and dull, even though I know that’s not really true. I’ve definitely lost a lot of the creative drive I used to have though, sadly.
My kids have revived that part of me. Seeing their goofy antics and fun nature is the best. Some of the antics they get up to in the toy box mode of Disney Infinity is hilarious!
Being somewhat poor, I did a lot of similar things as a child. I drew the levels from arcade games on paper and ‘played’ them at home. I also made the Ninja Turtles Van and the sewer lair playset out of cardboard – compete with working elevator.
It’s nice to see that my kids have inherited that creativity. They made a really crude Minecraft card game and they plan out their next Minecraft/Terraria projects in big sketch books – projects of impossible scope and function. I love watching that child-like creativity.