Scum and Villainy: Star Wars TCG & Pocketmodels

Everybody has an off day.

A sick day.

A day where it is impossible to force your pyjamas anywhere past your fucking knees.

One of those days where you don't make it beyond the bathroom or refrigerator depending on the layout of your domicile.  Yesterday being of those days; while I wallowed in my own fetid distillery-stench and self-loathing I spied something odd peeking out at me from a cracked dresser drawer that I haven't touched since 2008 - at least.

 

Boba Fett, silently judging me amongst a mass of old, too large, too colourful clothing that I've been too lazy to even consider thinking about for the past four years.

 Not swallowing the small pieces was a real challenge.

Okay, that's a lie.  I move, like, a lot.  More than most people do, and since I've never had a permanent residence that I trusted/had enough space - I've left a good chunk of belongings with one of my best mates who I used to room with. I'm visiting her now.  Obviously, she's a saint, or she just really wants to be on an episode of Hoarders.  Either/or.

Essentially, SWTCG&P is a standard game composed of a deck of cards that lists combat and objectives that supplement a fleet of miniature figures called units.  The player 'paid' to include a unit in his or her fleet and blah blah blah I've already lost interest in the rules.  I don't tend to buy these things to play them, I buy them to look at them.  I'm from the Pogs/Pokémon generation! I've just got to catch 'em all; not figure out what to do with them.  Here's the Wookieepedia TCG page if you're still curious.  Knock yourself out.

These are for something, I think.

Anyway, back to Boba Fett's blank-yet-judgmental stare and those unpunched styrene cards.  I can't photograph anything for shit, so you don't know it - but the box front prompts me to 'COLLECT THE SUPER RARE CHROME NABOO ROYAL YACHT!'

Sadly, I did not collect the SUPER RARE CHROME NABOO ROYAL YACHT!  Maybe that's why I stuffed this in some long deserted underwear drawer?  Maybe it's because I didn't get a Slave I?  Possibly it was because I was promised up to six ships and I only got three? Maybe it's because I realized there were no instructions on how to assemble these things!?!

This gives 'punching a V-card' a whole new meaning.

I don't care who you are, if you can look at that first card and tell me EXACTLY what a CR90 Corellian Corvette looks like and how to build it without having to wiki it - go fuck yourself. 

 

Fuck you too, Google.

After exhausting my search options, I settled in for the long haul.  Looking back on my many sleepless middle school nights, building Gundam after Gundam model kit in preparation to never have any friends who didn't breathe through their mouths in the history of ever - I decided to bust 'em out.  To build them to the best of my ability!

To get frustrated in the first ten minutes and abandon the pieces to go do something far more interesting!

I washed the dishes.  

Anything was better than facing this failure.  I'd wash the dogs!  Do the laundry!  Get ahead on my workload!  Be a fucking adult!  I even fancied calling people over and doing a big dinner, but I stopped my fantasy there.  People would see these tiny, space themed pieces of un-assembled plastic and they would judge.  They'd call me a quitter!  A loser!  An affront to the human race!

I mean, yeah.  I could've swept 'em up off of my desk and whisked 'em back into the box from whence they came.  Stuffed 'em back in the drawer 'o ugly clothes and forget about 'em for another four years.  But that would take effort, and I had already sat down.

Crap.

So I resorted to actually looking at the game manual, that boorish no-man's land where rules live and dreams go to die.  Where the reading is dry and my attention span becomes non-existent. At this point is where I began to wonder if I have some sort of learning disability.

The feeling of being outsmarted by a legion of hypothetical eight-year-olds?  It isn't a nice one.  But yeah, the gaming manual was, as I had originally thought, useless.

Oh, no - I mean, there was a small section on how to build a few of the ships.  You know.  The really common ones.  That I know.  That my mom knows.  That that one friend who's in their late thirties and has never even SEEN a single Star Wars film knows.

All of my hate, Star Wars Pocketmodel TCG.  ALL OF IT FOR YOU.

 Wow, rude.

Again, I frustratedly began scouring the internet, pleading with it to tell me exactly how do I attach the who-to-the-whatsits and where does that whirligig go?  Are there extra parts?  PLEASE GOD TELL ME THERE ARE EXTRA PARTS BECAUSE I HAVE LEFTOVER BITS.

But then I was distracted by the tiny dice. 

Someone, anyone, please.  Tell me.  WHAT IS THE POINT OF THESE THINGS?  I worked in a comic shop and sold loads of these, I've dated gamers, I've owned so many of these things and I just don't get it?  I do know that their miniscule size increases the desirability to know what would happen if my intestines actually could roll for fortitude.

Luckily, I didn't succumb to the urge to eat them - but what the fuck else was I supposed do with them?

Oh.  Yeah.

Besides allowing my larger action figures to indulge in a game of Craps whenever the mood strikes them, they're useless.  What's also infuriating?  The box?  That the game came in?  Totally big enough for two regular sized much harder to lose die.

Finally, my time came.  I had run out of all the other avenues to explore - I had to finish building those ships.  If I didn't I knew I'd have to phone up mother and tell her of my shortcomings.  She'd cry.  My father would brood stoically.  My college loans would triple. My life would be a wreck.

All this agony, and for what?  This.  Three small pieces of plastic that I'll immediately lose upon turning around twice.  I will begrudgingly admit that yeah they're pretty cool.  In the end it only actually looked scary, they were fairly easy to figure out minus Biggs's Skyhopper because there's like...voodoo in there.  You have to bend space and time to put that one together without shattering it with your massive adult sized hands.  I felt real suspense, like during the last sixteen hours of Inception.

There's even a little place on the bottom to slap your name on there.  Which I did.

Because I'm five.