デジカ

In 1998, as the YuGiOh manga shifted focus entirely to Duel Monsters, Bandai’s license to publish YuGiOh card game merchandise expired. This original iteration of the game boiled down to a slightly more complicated war, and you can read more about it here. The publisher needed something to replace it, with the goal of competing in the burgeoning trading card game landscape.

Seeking to capitalize upon the success of the Tamagotchi Digital Monster V-Pet, and simultaneously prime audiences for the release of the Digimon Adventure OVA, Bandai launched Digital Monster Card Game. Over the next several years, Bandai would release dozens of expansions to the Digital Monster Card Game, often referred to by its ruleset as Hyper Colosseum, or simply デジカ (DeJiCa). Expansion sets were released frequently via Carddass vending machines, and Bandai hosted a robust series of organized events across Japan through 2005(!). For several years in the mid-2000s, after the anime waned in popularity, this card game essentially kept the franchise relevant. DigiCa had such a huge following in Japan that new promotional cards are still being released, albeit very infrequently.

Hyper Colosseum arrived in the west as the Digi-Battle Card Game by Upper Deck in 1999. A starter set and two booster sets were released, with a third release wave of promos in Europe, and a final reprint set with different frames and backs in North America. While the art and card layout were localized without any notable changes, the rules were changed quite dramatically, eliminating much of the nuance found in the original ruleset. There were also some translation issues that make the game essentially unplayable. By the year 2000, the game was discontinued.

In 2001, the english dub of the third Digimon anime, Tamers, began airing in the west. Tamers served as a soft reboot of the franchise. Showrunner Chiaki J. Konaka has written loads about the production process and behind-the-scenes information. Renown even at the time for groundbreaking experimental anime like Serial Experiments Lain, the show is very much his magnum opus and he is often attributed as the source of its darkly conspiratorial tone (fair warning: he is now a 9/11 truther). Digimon was seen as a failing franchise by all accounts at this point, so bringing on a creative famous dude to write makes some sense, as does the editorial mandate that the show prominently feature real world merchandise, such as the V-Pets, video games, and, of course, Hyper Colosseum. Setting the series in real-world Japan were the franchise was popular amongst kids is a very meta-heavy take nowadays but it worked wonders here. Most western audiences were likely aware of the “Digimon Cards” which feature heavily in the show, and maybe even had a few lying around—completely ignorant of the importance the game held for the Japanese audience. 

These pages are still a work in progress. I began writing this with the intention to play this game using the English printing with its original Japanese ruleset. However, it is worth mentioning this upfront: that’s just not possible. I still intend to explore the mechanics and rules as-written in the english release, but the game is fundamentally non-functional. I’ve included links to a handful of sources online covering both the original game and the western translation, but none really tackle just how peculiar Digi-Battle is, nor why. So this is, sadly, not the DigiCa Rebuild I hoped for. Rather, it is a collection of all the fascinating peculiarities of a trading card game that never even had the chance to live, and was swept away by the tail end of Pokémania.

A particularly valuable resource here is the Tamer Union page, which I highly recommend for both the rules and history of TCG organized play in Japan at the turn of the century. There is also a handy database of western card sets here. Finally, in some cases, the comparisons I draw between Hyper Colosseum and Digi-Battle rely on some knowledge of other card games. As long as you have some passing knowledge of how trading card games function, you should be fine.