Baseball Cards

Collecting baseball cards has fallen out of the mainstream over the last decade or so. So many companies, so many different sets and so many different quality levels produced a glut that brought about indifference to the hobby.

That and the dark cloud of steroid use. Who cares if they guy hit 600 homeruns and is on a limited edition platinum card? He may have tarnished the game. Oh, and there's also his limited edition gold card and the one that has a piece of his jersey imbedded in it. And part of his bat...

Did I mention that kids also find other types of cards like Yugio and Pokeman way cooler nowadays?

But there's one thing that can't take away from people who have huge collections of old baseball cards that are pretty much useless. That would be the Baseball Card Game.

As far as I know, my twin brother and I invented this when we were 10 years old and it's so simple and fun to play that anybody can do it who has piles of old baseball cards.

And it gives new life to those old cards.

Randomly shuffle piles of old cards and have each player take 20 of them. The more cards you have, the more fun the game.

Each player deliberately selects a card (based on it's number) from the one that he's been dealt and they lay them down at the same time. They turn them over and the player with the highest number keeps both cards and those captured cards are put in a pile away form the cards they are still playing with.

You do that until all 20 of your cards are used up. The player with the biggest pile of captured cards wins.

Since you may be playing with dozens of years worth of old cards the odds of winning can't be calculated. One person may have several 800 number cards. Another may have a pile with no cards higher than the number 300.

The best part? There actually is a strategy to this game. Some will use all their smaller number cards first letting the other guy use his higher number cards to win early. Others may choose to use their higher number cards randomly hoping that's the other person's strategy.

The more you play, the more you'll see the potential strategies. And since this isn't like real cards you have no idea what numbers may come up when the other player shows his cards. Your guessing that your 650 card will trump his and then his 804 comes up and beats you. Again, the older card sets had numbers that high. If you have some of those, it's even more fun.

It's fun and my twin and I wasted hundreds of hours of our childhood playing this. We didn't need fantasy baseball. We had The Baseball Card Game.

The funny part? We played it  with ALL our cards. That included THREE Nolan Ryan rookie cards. We had no idea of their potential value. But we knew the value of the game.

To quote a TV commercial. Priceless.

One more thing. You can have as many players as you like, though strategy probably goes out the window with 8 players.