Did You Know There's a Resident Evil Card Game?

Time to put on some gloves and go spelunking in mom’s attic; we’ve got a weird flip for today. More than a decade ago, Bandai rolled out a deck-building game themed around the Resident Evil universe. Across five sets and two years the game achieved mostly middling reviews and further expansions were shelved. Fast forward a few presidents and they’ve become highly collectable and highly valuable. Here’s what we know.

The early 2010’s was an undeniably important era in video gaming history. It was the first, tenuous realization of years spent striving for photorealistic graphics. It was a clear breakthrough moment of games working their way back into the mainstream, with all the eyes and money to back it up. It was full of piss filters and gray skies and somber, stubbled protagonists; the forming ground for genres and concepts that define the industry today, from the noble to the ignoble.

And while the industry might have been lacking in mechanical and artistic creativity, there was no shortage of clever marketing ideas and promotional tie-ins. Who can forget the iconic campaigns running up to Halo 3 and Halo: Reach? Or EA paying protestors to boycott Dante’s Inferno?

That also meant we got our share of weird merch. One of these products is the short-lived Resident Evil deck-building game. Launched in 2010, each of the four expansion standalone sets would revolve around a particular game, from Mercenaries to RE4, Alliance, and Outbreak, while the seminal release was a conglomerate representation of the entire series.

The reviews were… okay? There’s one cached review from 2013 noting “graphic design of cards is poor. Text is difficult to read and the cards are very busy due to the artwork.” Another reads “There are no real decisions to be made, just draw your hand, hope you get enough weapons to kill something.” Holy hell it’s weird to look at a Reddit review with “posted 15 years ago” at the top.

Other reviews were more favorable, and a lot of players felt the game did a good job of capturing the series’ flavor and tone. Still, Mercenaries was the last set to be published in 2012.

While the Resident Evil card game might be dead, the series definitely isn’t. You could say were in the middle of an RE renaissance right now, largely spurred by the successful remakes of the first four games (the absolute state of AAA) alongside groundbreaking releases Biohazard and Village.

And now Requiem is about to release, once again featuring twink-supersoldier Leon S. Kennedy at his grayest and grizzliest alongside series newcomer Grace Ashcroft. As you can guess, the marketing is in full swing. We just covered a $3,600 official watch collab between Capcom and Hamilton.

These sales are recent too; people are buying and selling (and maybe even playing) the game to this day.

So if you’re a Resident Evil fan that picked one of these up back in the day and then quickly forgot about it, it might be a good time to go hunting. If that plastic wrap is still intact you might be sitting on a sizable payday.

And if not? You’d be smart to check shelves or bargain bins at local games stores and card shops. The owner might have a grail under their nose that they don’t know about.

Oh, and while you’re shopping, keep an eye out for Star Wars: Racer Revenge for the PS4. To make a long story short, prices for used copies of the game skyrocketed in January after PS5 jailbreakers revealed the game could be used to hack the console. You can find the full scoop here.