Yu-Gi-Oh Game

By Jonathan Berohn

With autumn, as we all know, comes the time for the kids to go back to school. The sound you hear is all the parents rejoicing. Unfortunately for me, school this year sees my son entering 1st grade, and the beginning of the Yu-Gi-Oh craze. If you are lucky enough not to know what Yu-Gi-Oh is, you should stop reading now, click on the nearest link, empty your browser cache, and pretend you never heard of it. Unfortunately, it will eventually find you, but any extra time you can buy is well worth it for your sanity.

This is a Kids' Game?

Yu-Gi-Oh, as those of you still reading probably know, is a card game aimed at the 8-12 set. Unfortunately for those of us with younger kids, the 8-12 set goes to school with 6-8 set (and often has overlapping siblings) so the allure of Yu-Gi-Oh trickles down. Now ordinarily, this wouldn't be too much of a problem. It's a card game, after all-what could be the harm, right? Hah! Yu-Gi-Oh is to kids' card games what nuclear physics is to your old chemistry set experiments.

Surely you must be kidding, you say. Hah, again! Yu-Gi-Oh sports - and I'm not kidding here - a 40-page rulebook. Yes, that's not a typo - forty pages. Don't worry, though, it's really quite simple. You just have to remember to draw a card before you go into the summon phase and normal summon a monster in attack or defense mode before switching to attack phase, casting spells and traps, countering spells and traps, and countering counter spells and traps. Oh yeah - and don't forget the special summon phase. Ugh. Best of all, my 8 year-old daughter won't play, so even if my son could remember the rules he's got no one to play with but me. Woohoo.

At Least It's Expensive

If that's not bad enough, Yu-Gi-Oh sticks you everywhere it can. The starter deck costs $12.99. At first that doesn't seem bad, until you realize you need two starter decks to play a game. Cha-ching - $26 to play a kids card game. But wait - Yu-Gi-Oh thoughtfully offers expansion card packs and $3.99 for either 6 or 8 cards (it's all sort of a blur by now), and they come out with new series all the time so you always have something to buy. Oh - and did I mention the cards have painfully small print?