It may seem super obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how often I heard “wait, this is a game?” when I worked at the game shop. Little kids just liked the cards and often wouldn’t understand what all the additional info on them meant. And a lot of parents just bought them for their kids and didn’t pay attention to what their kids were doing with them. I remember one time a parent who had been dropping her kid off at our store at 10am almost every day through the summer came by early to pick him up and he was in the middle of a game. She watched for awhile and asked me what they were doing with the cards, and when I explained it was a game she was surprised. I asked her what she thought her kid had been doing in our store for 6+ hours every day all Summer and she said she thought he just traded the cards.
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It doesn’t surprise me that Modest doesn’t know it’s a game.
Granted I never did figure out how to play.
I am SO glad that she understands it isn’t a reward
I think when you get into that much trouble, even when you don’t actually have to take the blame, it makes you very cautious. At least for a few minutes.
Look at Mike, so smooth with the upsell!
Oh man, I would have had zero interests in Trading Card Games if you couldn’t play them. I don’t care at all about the collecting part, it’s the game aspect that I care about.
I played a little bit of Pokémon, YuGiOh and (with other people’s decks in that case, I did not have any cards) Magic: The Gathering. And quite a lot of the DBZ cardgame.
Nowadays I play MTG:Arena, where you don’t have any physical cards but still get to play the game. 🙂
I get that. Some people only care about the game. For some people its the collecting or the art and characters
I wonder, if Modest would get a job at some point to repay Jake all damage she’s done.
And how that would fail spectacularly.
I think Modest has powerful guilt, so at some point she might try something like that.
So to sum it up… first Modest’s clothes disappear in front of the entire class (complete with having to explain herself to the adults she doesn’t like), then she learns about bones and skeletons, then she magics herself sick, then her hair nearly chokes on food and tries to steal her other snack as well, then instead of a video game store she gets a board game store, then she ends up opening and inadvertently forcing Jake to buy a whole box of cards, and now she learns Pokémon TCG is a game… all in one day? Modest’s gonna be gooey.
This has been a tough one. Its not as bad as Season 3, which was all just one day. But she’ll need to go to bed early for sure!
Welp, that’s Modest’s next twelve birthday and Christmas presents already pre-bought.
I used to be into the pokemon card game, but one time at the local Boys & Girls Club, I was showing off my collection to some nearby kids, and we were trading and such. (Always a good start to a story.) I had em in a binder with the card protectors, my parents being D&D/gaming nerds themselves, they helped me and my brother out with this. At one point, I showed them some of my cooler cards as a sign of friendship, and inevitably, they just grabbed my binder and ran off with it. My brother took off after them, but they outpaced him, and I was no runner at all. I ran to the people running the B&G, but the kids never showed up again, so I couldn’t point them out. They were just neighborhood kids who just came by and nicked my things.
Instilled in me a strong dislike for sharing my things or showing them off. When we had to go to a babysitters instead later on for reasons, she would always insist we shared our things and I always fought her tooth and nail. She’d put her foot down and, say, take my gameboy with pokemon blue or gold in it and let the younger kid whining to try it out, and when I finally got it back, half my pokemon were released, or some such. It was very frustrating. Kind of made me a selfish person, in some regards, overall.
Yeah, I get that. Adults who don’t understand your hobbies or interests or toys will often try to make you share the, or use them in ways that do harm to them or invalidate the time you’ve invested in them. I remember being a kid witha new Nintendo and my mom insisting that every 5 minutes I let my sister play Super Mario Brothers. I couldn’t make her understand that it was already a two player game and my sister was already getting her turns. Or that I was making progress in the game that would be erased as soon as I handed my sister the controller and she purposely jumped into the first hole she saw (because her whole deal was ruining my fun). My mom INSISTED, and refused to actually understand what we were doing.
I saw this a lot at the game store too, where certain parents would INSIST their kid share all their cards with the other kids. And the kid would desperately try to explain that’s not how the game works, and these kids are just going to take their cards and never give them back. There were parents that did the opposite too. Show up with their kids and insist other kids GIVE their kids cards to play with.
We saw a lot of dashers at the shop too, just like you describe. Running in and just grabbing binders or boxes or backpacks. There were two or three local shops that would buy cards no questions asked, and I’d always stop by and check at those shops a few days later and they’d have a whole selection of new cards. Some kids wrote their names on their card sleeves, and there it would be in the shop case, with a new price tag and “Jack” written across it in magic marker.
Thankfully, my parents have never been that bad. They’ve been a little slow with certain aspects of video games, like “online games such as MMOs or Minecraft Realms not being able to pause”, but overall they are pretty damn good about it. As I said before, they are old dab hands at D&D and LARPing. Both my mom and dad were around and religiously played D&D 1.0 and 2.0, all the way until now. When I was about 10, they got my brother and I into 3.0 D&D. We still game together as a family, learning 5.0.
I taught my mom a lot of games, my biggest regret being Skyrim. Her being a big D&D and fantasy fangirl, she adhered to it like you wouldn’t believe and she not only plays the game all the time, but mods the hell out of it, and writes (apparently really well-received) fanfiction based in it’s world. She’s in her mid-60s now, and still playing games like Pokemon (at first just to teach us kids video games, but now because she likes them), Zelda games, Minecraft, Stardew Valley (another major vice), and all manner of things.
My dad’s a lot more shy, he mostly just watches.
Thats cool. I’m glad older adults aren’t giving this stuff up. All the adults I knew when I was a kid seemed joyless. They had sports, and that was pretty much it.
Modest still needs a starter deck.
Jake has her covered.
She understands, on a deep level, that ya gotta catch ’em all.