I don't think there's much value in playing this game today tbh. As an rpg, it's extremely stripped down and doesn't have much going on¹, and as a tcg is... well, early pokemon tcg, as in you either make a casual deck and resign yourself to every game being decided by irritating coinflips, or build Haymakers/Rain Dance and just steamroll every NPC.

That said, if you were a kid in the early-to-mid 00s the collectable/perpetual nature of this game sort of ruled.

Anyhow, play Card City Nights.

¹That's actually a bit of clever design tho. I've tried playing some of the Nintendo DS Yu Gi Oh games and immediately gave up on them cause 3/4th of the game was walking around and talking to people, and it mostly felt like it got in the way of the TCGing. Pokemon TCG GB actually hits a good sweet spot of rpg-ness, where you still get the pleasant progression system and some flavour, but it never just stops to a halt asking you to do rpg things.

Truly a game of contrast. Such a freeing and beautiful open world coupled with such restrictive and frustratingly linear missions. Such great character writing and dialogue coupled with such garbage-ass mission design. Really enjoyed my time with this wonderful game, but god damn can it be frustrating. So many times I’ve failed a mission because I didn’t do exactly what the game wants me to. I didn’t even go out of my way to break the game or anything, it just happened naturally so, so, so many times. Not to mention how repetitive it all is. Start mission>Ride horse for like 5 minutes>Do a thing>Thing goes wrong>Shoot a bajillion people>Repeat like 100 times. Just a very flawed game, but the world is so easy to get lost and immersed in that it’s easy to forgive. And the writing is really good for the most part. Arthur especially, legit incredible. Overall, a bit of a mess, but what a beautiful mess it is.

 I had high hopes for this game when I bought the Founder's pack a long time ago, when there was only one mountain. The game was free to play back then, and the Founder's pack was $50. I felt like chipping in for something I thought had a lot of potential. And potential it did have—exploring the wide open mountain was neat, the physics worked, people who bought the Founder's pack had special gear, and snowmobiles were supposedly in the works.

 Over time, though, I saw the game start to degrade. The physics got worse and worse, controls became increasingly stubborn, and when online rolled out it was a buggy, laggy mess. Soon after, microtransactions started and the mountain I enjoyed exploring got locked under a paywall. I didn't have access to it even though I bought the damn Founder's pack! That's when I gave up on the game entirely, uninstalling it without looking back.

 Apparently, the game never recovered. Multiplayer servers were removed. Support for VR mode, which was by all accounts pretty solid, was also removed. The game is $15 now and worse than it was when it was free. Poppermost built a really great foundation for what could have been the next best winter sports game, but unable to live up to their promises, ultimately destroyed it.