The Most Awful Game I've Ever Played: the Eldritch Horror of the 2004 American Idol Season 3 Card Game

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My friend’s basement flooded recently, and when he was hauling stuff out of there in order to keep it dry, he happened to find a box of old, strange childhood card games from when they were really popular and it seemed everything had a card game with it. We found a book of Zatch Bell! playing cards, an old anime about magical fighting puppers, a knock-off of Magic: the Gathering printed by a now-extinct card company, a game in the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe called Dungeon Dice Monsters, and several others in a sodden box, one of the others being the dreaded American Idol Season 3 Collectible Card Game. It sounds almost Lovecraftian when you think about it, doesn’t it? Like the Necronomicon, this terrible, terrible thing that seems fun, if perhaps dated, was found only in a flood.

To my shame, I was one of the ones who lobbied to play it. In recent years, I’ve transitioned from becoming a casual, social gamer who only took part when there were other people there to someone who liked to try a taste of every game to see how it worked and how the mechanics reflected the theme of the game. Settlers of Catan, for example, is a pretty well-known strategy tabletop game à la the Civilization game series, where you preside over a relatively small kingdom and try to accumulate enough victory points to succeed, which while competitive, doesn’t really involve direct warfare (minus those terribly irritating well-placed Thieves to deny you your bricks for your Longest Road, of course). This is called a German-style board game; it focuses on tactical thinking rather than mere chance or conflict, keeps all players involved until the very end, and players interact only indirectly.

Now take a more common card game, like War, an American-style game where it’s all chance, and an odd, bloodless form of fighting. I’ve seen people play it mindlessly for hours, not keeping track of who’s winning, but simply revealing and reshuffling in a sort of stupor (I do think it was finals week at my college when this happened, which I admit to their benefit). Even more complex games, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic: the Gathering, while having far higher levels of strategy, still operate with direct interaction and the paradigm of conflict. There are two decks, two people, and you have to cast spells or summon monsters to get their life points down to 0 as quick as possible. In the world of Yu-Gi-Oh!, this is taken further in “Shadow Games” where the opponent does actually die if they lose at their children’s card game, their soul consigned to a place of suffering and pain for all eternity. Which is really pretty dark for a child’s game, but that’s beside the point.

To get the point, and the godless abomination that is the American Idol Season 3 Collectible Card Game, we can see there are indirect interactions and direct interactions, and that indirect interactions are generally on a higher level than direct ones. The American Idol Season 3 Collectible Card Game, referred to as the endless dark hunger between the stars AICCG from here on out (pronounced like the sound you make when you bang your shin on something at night) is primarily American-style, as you might guess. And American-style games are more about drama and conflict and big swings, and AICCG does indeed have these, but also has this fatal flaw: it’s never-ending, in a hideous, eternally frustrating cycle before you ever get to the end-game. Literally endless. But before I delve into its abysmal depths, let me tell you the story of how we first played it.

Several months later, after it was pulled out of the grimy depths of the flooded basement and we’re checking out the repairs and renovations, complete with gray hardwood floors, rainbow LED lights, a mini-bar, the works, he pulls this innocuous blue box out of a drawer. “Hey,” he asks, grinning, “remember these?” And of course we didn’t, but looking through the cards, the names seemed fun enough, with songs like “Ruff Boi” and special cards like “Judge Nasty Says No,” and we decided to give it a whirl. 

 

The void of despair and judgment that is Judge Nasty.

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“Judge Nasty?” you might be wondering, which we wondered too, until we realized that “Judge Nasty” was Simon Cowell, who in a stroke of genius didn’t allow his likeness be used in the game. That was the first warning sign, really, but the game seemed simple enough. Play Singer cards, pair them with song cards, and when someone has three pairs you advance to the voting stage where players take turns voting points to themselves or others, dropping the player with the lowest points each time until one remains. This seems simple, initially, and the game’s instructions say it only takes fifteen minutes to an hour to play.

What fools we were. In addition to the cards I just mentioned, there’s also judge cards that subtract or add to the value of the singer/song pairing. Say you play a singer worth 2 points, and a song worth 4, that’ll give you six points total. Then you can play a judge card on it to make it worth more, or you can play a judge card on others to make them worth less, and if the value goes below zero, it’s sent to the discard pile. Moreover, if there’s a pair of singer and song without any additions or other cards on it, there’s also the ability to “steal” songs by playing your own singer and stealing the unprotected song.

At first, these seem reasonable, and while I’m slightly simplifying the game, it seems necessary for there to be some sort of player interaction to keep things interesting and dynamic rather than just a quiet matching game. But in reality, these do so much more. Even the kindest judge—Randy, who was still on the show then—has a high number of devastating -8 or -7 cards that can effectively destroy any pairing, and if one of those won’t do it, there are plenty of smaller ones for other players to pile on to destroy any hope of any single person getting three matches. And even when the cards, as is their nature, eventually run out, they reshuffle.

So there are endless cycles of candids of now-defunct American Idol singers, dressed in familiar-yet-unfamiliar fashions, most of the female singers in inexplicably low-cut dresses and all of the guys for some reason wearing hats, endlessly cycling in and out of your hand and the field, and as you begin to taste victory while you have what you think are two indestructible pairings and a third on the way, like Briana Ramirez-Rial singing the infamous “Ruff Boi” song with her face caught in a strange, painful-looking grimace, the dream-crushing black silhouette of “Judge Nasty” and an inexplicably angry Randy Jackson thwart your hopes again and again, time after time. 

One of the damned who had their souls bound in the cards.

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The cycle continued between us five players for nearly two hours before I finally cheated and snuck a card under the table between my toes to keep someone’s third pair from being destroyed, but even that was only accomplished by me and another player actively playing “Yea, Yea, Yea!” and “Mhmmmmmmmmm” cards in their favor. And the thing is, we were stuck in this repetitive hell by playing the game properly, trying to keep other people from making matches and protecting our own, but the prevalence of the strong removal cards was so high it was impossible, making this truly the worst game I've ever played.

Of course, it didn’t help that it was after midnight and we were all decently drunk, but at least for me it was frustratingly terrible I couldn’t help but laugh, and almost surreal, in a sense, playing endless hands of dead-to-the-world minor celebrities from a show I'd never even seen.

Have you had any sort of terrible game like that? Let me know in the comments!

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Japanese Folklore, Zombie Clowns, and the Exiled Alien: Deckbuilding as Storytelling

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My experience with CCGs, collectible card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, or Magic: the Gathering, is probably like a lot of people’s. I played a “rules-light” variant of them when I was little (read: I was 8 and had no idea what the cards do or how the game actually worked) mainly because of the appeal of the TV shows. Even people who aren’t still actively involved in the games still recognize Pikachu or “Exodia, Obliterate!” from the shows we all watched after school and the video games we’d all play. (Duelists of the Roses, anyone?)

But just like a smaller group of people, I also came back to these games later in high school and college. I didn’t really make friends in high school until just the end of it, but one thing we all played, oddly, was Yu-Gi-Oh!, so I brushed off the old cards in the back of my closet and started dueling. We spent so many hours playing it, staying at the school in the band room until six or seven at night, sometimes even playing with one of the directors. One of my closest friends, Alex, had a three-hour match with a director once, the director sitting behind an indestructible, magic-proof dragon, while my friend drew desperately and tried to find an out but only ended up staying until 8:30 and worrying his mom.

Part of what kept us playing it, I think, is that a couple of months into playing I got tired of losing so much with the rag-tag collection of cards from childhood (though I did find a still-treasured God card smashed behind a drawer in my desk that gave me some victories) and built my own deck, using YGOPro—a free software that gives you access to every card ever to test new decks and see how things work—to create a deck I’d eventually call “Spirits.” I was the first one to do this and also the first one to buy card sleeves to protect the cards and give them a uniform appearance, and so this pre-conceived deck started tearing up the competition, which made Alex build his own deck, which led to four years of frantic deck-building and continual competition and aggression.

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Adam’s Bayberry Spruce, named for the candlebox the deck was kept in, was a frighteningly aggressive zombie deck where mummies and ghoulish clowns paid in blood for especially vicious attacks. David’s Worms were a pensive, stall-y, defensive deck that focused on running out putting the stack of cards the opponent drew from into the discard pile, giving them an automatic win without ever attacking. My own Spirits were a mix of the two playstyles, alternately aggressive and defensive, as however far they advanced they’d have to go back to the hand, “the Spirit Realm,” at the end of the turn.

But just there were so many we built, me and Alex especially eventually building dozens of decks over time and having eight or so on hand at any given hangout. I remember all of them: the Carnival of Horrors (or Clown Control), The Last Warrior from Another Planet, Shadolls, Cloudians, Zombags, Destiny Board, Melodious, Gishkis, Classic Horrible Beatdown, Burning Abyss, Bujins, Trains, Triamids, Ghostricks, False Gods--each of them with their own tricks and stratagems, each with their own boss monster to work toward, each having their own story woven into the cards.

That’s why these things have staying power in my mind. Deck-building is really a creative exercise, taking a pre-existing story that’s been broken up into distinct events and reassembling it into a form that works, that has power and can do things. Take Spirits, for example, where the most important card in there was Aratama, a Japanese personification of bravery (and recklessness and all sorts of other “hot” emotions) in the form of a little bull-horned imp, weak in itself but able to call all sorts of other creatures—even the gods—to its aid, and so this story of Japanese mythology starts with bravery, a small voice being unafraid to speak.

But it continues with Nikitama, the personification of calmness, reasoning, and patience, a green little dude that allows an additional Spirit to be played that turn (in Yu-Gi-Oh!, you only get one free summon a turn) and also encourages you to tribute it to bring out one of the bigger spirits, like Amaterasu, the temporarily cave-dwelling sun god that scorches the entire battleground to a flat plane of ash, or Yamata Dragon, the nine-headed serpent borne from the annual floods that Susano, the storm god, always beats back, just as he beats back every threat. And there are other, minor cards too, like Izanami, Mother of Gods, who can bring back an ally for a cost, or ones that are part of the story but don’t make the cut into a deck, like Asura Priest, a Hindu-themed fighter that leaves no enemy unchallenged but just isn’t quite good enough.

And so underlying these mythic, powerful gods is the simple duality of courage and patience, something I think is lovely and humbling, which is why Spirits is one of the decks I always enjoy playing, even if I lose—I get to see this awesome story play out in front of me, even if it ends badly, and that’s meaningful in itself. And I get to see my friends tell their stories they’ve made, too, fighting against the horror of the dead brought back to life or against an infestation of worms that can’t simply be beat down, stuff that speaks to them the same way my medley of Japanese folklore speaks to me.

Have you had similar experiences with Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: the Gathering, or Pokémon? Tell me your favorite deck below!

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