Star Wars Once Made You Build Tiny Ships Before You Could Play the Card Game

Eighteen years ago today, Star Wars released an expansion for a card game that did not trust cards to be interesting enough on their own.

On July 26, 2008, WizKids launched the Clone Wars expansion for the Star Wars PocketModel Trading Card Game. It was a collectible game where players opened packs, pushed tiny plastic pieces out of cards, assembled miniature starfighters, and then used those ships in battle.

So before you could play, you first had to prove you were capable of building an ARC-170 without snapping off something important.

A Card Game with Actual Ships Inside

The Star Wars PocketModel TCG combined trading cards with constructible miniatures.

Each pack contained flat plastic model sheets. Players punched out the pieces and slotted them together to create small ships, vehicles, and other units. Those models were then placed directly on the table and used in a simplified miniatures game with movement, attacks, dice rolls, and damage.

The cards supplied missions, effects, and other tactical options, while the models did the shooting.

It was part card game, part tabletop wargame, and part miniature construction project. It was also an excellent way to discover that a small plastic wing could vanish into a carpet without leaving any evidence whatsoever.

The original game launched in 2007, with the Clone Wars set arriving the following year as one of its later expansions.

The Clone Wars Arrived at Exactly the Right Time

The expansion was released on July 26, 2008, just weeks before Star Wars: The Clone Wars reached cinemas.

That timing gave WizKids an entire new collection of ships and vehicles to work with, including hardware from both the Republic and Separatist forces. The set became the first of two PocketModel expansions focused on the Clone Wars era.

For younger players, it was a fairly brilliant proposition.

You did not merely collect a picture of a ship. You built the ship, placed it on the table, and then attempted to destroy somebody else’s badly assembled ship before yours fell apart on its own.

The models were small enough to fit in a pocket, assuming that pocket contained no keys, coins, or sudden movements.

The Game Had a Very Short Life

The clever format was not enough to save it.

WizKids produced only a small number of sets before its owner, Topps, shut down the company’s operations in November 2008. The Star Wars PocketModel TCG was discontinued along with the rest of the product lines.

That gave the game a remarkably brief existence.

It arrived with a genuinely inventive idea, expanded into the Clone Wars era, and disappeared before it had much chance to develop. The result is one of those strange pieces of Star Wars gaming history that many players remember vividly, while everyone else reacts with the same question:

“Wait, the cards turned into spaceships?”

Yes. They did.

A Very 2000s Star Wars Experiment

The PocketModel game belongs to a particular era when companies were willing to combine several hobbies into one product and hope children understood the instructions.

It was collectible, tactical, physical, fragile, and just complicated enough to feel important.

Today, Star Wars tabletop games tend to arrive with beautifully sculpted miniatures already assembled. PocketModel made you earn yours by balancing several microscopic pieces between your fingers while pretending you were enjoying yourself.

But that awkwardness was part of the charm.

Eighteen years later, the Clone Wars expansion remains a wonderfully odd artifact from a period when a Star Wars card game could look at an ordinary deck and decide it needed more spaceships.