The CCG Bubble of the mid-late 90s led to an unprecedented amount of creativity within the traditional games space https://twitter.com/nex3/status/1199086783222255616

I have been asked for details, so, a thread, from your board and card game historithusiast Jeb!

Let's head back to the Nineties. A terrifying era of out of control centrism being pushed around by the remnants of the 80s Reaganite Hypercapitalism. Board games were Brands by now.

Uno, Rubik's, Monopoly all were swimming in spinoffs. Clue was exploring VHS.

Board game innovation went either towards building brands or new technology.

Remakes and Remasters were getting steam (CROSSFIYAH!)

You could trip over licensed shovelware. Everything had a mediocre tie-in.

THQ made a Home Alone 2 board game.

TSR was a little bit removed from making Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Up in Washington, a little company that had just started distributing Robo Rally. A neat bit of a "Programmable" board game from the mind of some designer guy.

This company was chugging along slowly in the niche markets, but muscled out of more success by Brands and Technology.

Until the designer guy brought up a piece of tech he'd been working on on his own.

A fantasy card game where your deck was built from your own collection pulled from packs like trading cards.

Now I'm not going to talk about the ethics of it all - but that game earned that little company approximately All The Dollars ever, and suddenly everyone was taking notice.

But how do we get our share, everyone asked?

There's a little-appreciated secret around game designers and that's that, despite often having to work on the most repetitive or insipid or derivative stuff, they're mostly very creative people at heart.

You don't often actively seek to Make Games For A Living if you aren't interested in Making Games.

So what we have are a mass of highly creative people suddenly asked to shift from making knockoffs and brand builders to make sonething completely new to them.

"How do we even MAKE SimCity into a card game?"
"Hey we've got decades of stills to pull from for Star Trek what can we do with that?"
"What about making part of the game reading the card text?"

Ideas came out of the woodwork.

I remember playing a CCG spinoff of a TTRPG where you built a tarot layout and simulated the influence and manipulation of society in the name of one of the Angelic Hosts.

It was unbalanced but it was rad! It was so very different.

Netrunner explored new ways to tie together resource management and development using almost exclusively the cards in your deck.

The Middle-Earth CCG explored creating a navigable map and character development using cards.

Game designers had to go deeper and deeper to figure out ways to stand out, and the limitation of mostly having only cards to work with kept them pushing against those limitations, like we see now with themed game jams

No, these weren't all good games - most weren't. But for every mtg rip-off there was something like Monty Python and the Holy Grail that had singing mechanics, or the living narrative experiments from Legend of the Five Rings

Update - I made an error in the release of Robo Rally, it was after MtG, not before. I'm sorry.