We’re trying something a bit different this week. We asked five game critics for a piece on a mobile game they play regularly, but never get to actually write about.
Next, it’s prolific freelance writer and Guardian contributor Tom Regan on why Pokémon TCG Pocket keeps him coming back:
As someone who writes about games for a living, you’d be surprised at how rarely I consider my ever-present phone to be a place to play. Or at least I didn’t until Pikachu convinced me otherwise.
Since launching in October 2024, Pokémon TCG Pocket has become a daily fixture in my life. I have always flirted with the eye-wateringly expensive physical trading card game, it was the nostalgia-tickling card art that initially drew me to Pocket.
An opportunity to collect all my favourite 151 Pokémon in card form without spending hundreds of pounds? Sold! Yet while I expected my interest to swiftly wane after I tore open a few virtual packs, TCG Pocket is now as solid a part of my morning routine as that first cup of coffee. Why? Because of an unexpected factor compelling me to return – Poké peer pressure.
Ever since its inception, Pokémon has been about playing with friends. When a young Satoshi Tajiri first pitched the idea of a monster catching game, it was Nintendo’s newly-developed link cable that sealed the deal. What if players could trade and battle with their pals, sending Pocket Monsters to one another across packed playgrounds? 24 years later, I find myself unexpectedly reliving those ‘90s playground glory days again in TCG Pocket. As I battle friends and strangers alike – or convince a mate to trade me that elusive EX card from the last expansion – TCG taps into Tajiri’s initial link cable vision.
I’m not alone. With interest in Pokemon cards at an all-time high post-pandemic, this Dena-developed Pokémon TCG app amassed 60m downloads in its first seven weeks. While over 20m of those players inevitably dropped off by March 2025, TCG Pocket is still hugely popular, its playerbase currently floating around the 35m player mark. In other words, this little-hyped trading card app has struck a chord in a way that The Pokémon Company’s been trying to replicate since Pokémon Go.
With a new expansion hitting the game every month, there’s always that nagging curiosity that beckons myself and other Poké-pilled players to open the app. After a few underwhelming expansions, more care has gone into the art and themes of recent content drops.
Old favourite ‘mon return. New types of cards team with exciting tactical possibilities. Much like Hearthstone before it, Pocket’s developed a deep competitive meta, too, with online trading and ranked battles keeping players excitedly sharing new custom decks on Reddit while raging about the latest expansion’s overpowered cards.
Another factor undoubtedly driving TCG Pocket’s success is how surprisingly gentle its microtransactions are. Despite logging in daily for almost a year, I have never been forced into spending any money. In fact, I only parted with my cash once a week into TCG Pocket, after misunderstanding the myriad of disparate in-game currencies. While I’m sure that these systems are intentionally baffling, I quickly managed to parse the app’s arcane-feeling virtual currencies and haven’t given mobile Pikachu another penny since.
While a couple of underwhelming expansion packs saw me abandoning Pocket for a few months, eventually nostalgic selections of Pokémon, strong artwork and the promise of exciting battle metas soon had me crawling back into TCG’s Pocket.
Whenever I have drifted away, there’s been more peer pressure for me to return to Pocket than I’ve ever had to do drugs. From people at house parties drunkenly challenging me to battles – and my inevitable humiliating defeat motivating me to build a better deck – to my partner asking me to trade with her, TCG Pocket feels alluringly social in a way that mobile games rarely do.
Where licensed mobile games often feel like soulless cash grabs, TCG Pocket succeeds because it embodies what we all love about Pokémon. Sure, Candy Crush and Balatro are brilliant ways to retreat into your phone and tune out the world, but Pocket’s Wonder Picks are daily reminders that my friends are still diligently building decks and becoming better trainers without me.
TCG taps into that excitable mystique that Pokemon represented when I was a kid – the desire to show off your latest decks, discover cool new cards and to become the very best. Here’s to another year of ripping packs and hoarding hourglasses.
