US shops blamed the drop in roleplaying on the invention of the Collectable/Customizable Card Game, but here, with a succession of magazines having failed to take over the role of RPG information provider when White Dwarf suddenly ceased to fulfill that function, everyone involved with RPG's was struggling already. M:TG provided a life-line - for the only time in our history, we were selling a product by the bucket-load without it promptly turning up at cost price in Argos. Being a new concept, it needed the knowledge and enthusiasm of the specialist shops, we were safe from being undercut by the Big Boys for the time being. Within 2 years there were over 200 CCG's, with most of them being very playable games. The C definitely stood for Customizable as much as Collectable.

It couldn't last, of course, and once Hasbro saw the sales that Pokemon was achieving they bought Wizards of the Coast and half the rest of the games industry with it. Around that time, Hasbro in the UK had so little interest in independent toy or games shops that we were not even allowed onto their stand at the Toy Fair where the new products were launched! 90% of their sales were through three large retail chains, the masses would buy whatever TV advertising told them to buy, so there was no need to develop, still less nurture, new products. Any CCG of theirs that did not perform immediately was liable be knocked out cheap to the clearance specialists. Most games shops are wary of CCG's these days. So are most players. Comic shops can sell them on the purely collectable basis, so there is less incentive for the designers to concentrate on good game play.

Never-the-less, there is life yet in the genre from a gaming perspective. Magic: The Gathering continues to attract new adherents, and we now have enough local players to run regular tournaments, for the first time in years. Vampire: The Eternal Struggle has also continued to be played locally for a decade. Yu-Gi-Oh is actually played, rather than just collected, far more than Pokemon ever was, so there is hope of the players looking at other games too. Legend of the Five Rings still has a fine reputation. And we tried the recently-released History of War and found it worthy of further attention - the obvious similarity to M:TG in the systems used makes it easier to learn! There are some intriguing strategic possiblilities it is not actually a collectable card game, since there is just a single, non-random expansion pack for each side, but is IS customizable, nicely demonstrating what I was waffling on about above.

The livelier off-shoot of CCG's is the CMG - again, though, there is the question of how much the C stands for Collectable first and Customizable second. WizKids, the prime movers behind the genre, effectively killed off Mage Knights as a game by dropping the sets that people needed more of just as they were starting to play regularly, on the assumption that they would blindly collect the later incompatible sets regardless. With games such as MechWarrior: Dark Age and MechWarrior: Age of Destruction the random mix in the booster packs quickly became an annoyance to the players, and only the hardened collector shops could get enough for the rare models to cover the loss on all the unwanted ones when splitting packs. Even with the Axis and Allies Collectable Miniatures, very much a game to be played, with little appeal to the pure collector, Hasbro have made the starter pack unavailable for most of its life so that new players often cannot get the rules! They also tried to leave the Star Wars CMG devoid of stormtroopers by prematurely withdrawing the pack containing them, but happily have been persuaded to re-print it, twice so far. We now have regular Star Wars tournaments, with new players who would have been unable to join in without the reprints.

Wizkids also produce the Pirates of the Spanish Main CMG which really comes into its own as a multi-player game although the rules are still written as a quick game for two. Every version of this adds new types of ships and crew - with the original set out of print, there had been problems getting more crew for the original ships, but the latest version, Pirates of the South China Seas, contains an assortment from all the previous sets as well as new strange oriental devices such as the Korean Turtle Ship, and has been accordingly popular.