デジカ

In 1998, as it’s manga shifted focus entirely to Duel Monsters, Bandai’s license to publish simple YuGiOh card game merchandise expired. The publisher sought to replace it with a new game that would capitalize upon the success of the Tamagotchi Digital Monster V-Pet, and simultaneously prime audiences for the release of the Digimon Adventure OVA. 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. The third Digimon anime, Tamers, prominently featured the game. DigiCa had such a huge following in Japan that new cards are still being released, albeit very infrequently.

Hyper Colosseum was brought to the West by Upper Deck in 1999 as the Digi-Battle Card Game. While the art and card layout were localized without any notable changes, many of the cards were poorly translated, both rhetorically and functionally. The game itself also changed quite dramatically, eliminating much of the nuance found in the original ruleset. Two booster sets were released, but the third and final release consisted entirely of reprints with different frames and backs in North America. By the year 2000, the game was all but dead. As Pokémania slowly faded, the Tamers dub was finally released in the West in 2001 to little fanfare. Most viewers 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, even then, for the Japanese audience. 

This page is still a work in progress. It began as an attempt 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. It is difficult to talk about game state and rules-as-written in the english release, since 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 a DigiCa rebuild. Rather, it is a collection of all the fascinating peculiarities of a dead trading card game.

If you want to learn more about Hyper Colosseum, all the sources I’ve used can be found at the bottom of the page, but a particularly valuable resource was 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.