Teamworking Day: The Austin Powers Collectible Card Game 🌭

Brockway: It’s shorthand for despicable hackery now, but in the late ‘90s the Austin Powers series was the biggest comedy franchise in the world. On paper, I don’t hate it. It was an original, high concept comedy whose premise was deeply personal to Mike Meyers. Austin Powers’ entire vibe was just a mash-up of every show he and his dad used to watch together back when he was a kid. The comedy is dated, sure. That’s all of our fates. It’s not like it was a cultural crime.

Until the Collectible Card Game.

Seanbaby: Oh, fuck.

Brockway: On cardstock, I hate it. The Austin Powers CCG was designed by Decipher, Inc. for New Line Studios, and it might be the most cursed object I’ve ever found. It truly should not exist in this universe. Collectible cards for a weird comedy? Sure, ask Bingo the dog-murdering pet adventure for children. A CCG for a popular film franchise? Alien has one. So does Predator and Terminator. But a CCG for a horny autobiographical period spy parody? It’s an insane thing to say out loud, much less produce and market. It’s like making Woody: The Allening.

Seanbaby: This is unappealing in a criminal way. Like, if I found this box of cards I would assume I’m also about to find a dead body and say, “Looks like the Oh Behave Killer has struck again. Or the It’s a Man Baby Butcher… the No This is Me in a Nutshell Help I’m In a Nutshell Night Strangl– you get it.”

Brockway: Yeah, it’s such a powerful mind crime it draws other crimes to it. I think they call it a reverse-Caliban. Aside from absolutely everything, the weirdest thing about the Austin Powers CCG is that the designers have an obvious passion for card mechanics, and an alien dying from fart poisoning’s understanding of Earth humor.

Seanbaby: Oh, fuck.

Brockway: Buddy. Friend. My dearest one. If you’re cringing just from the ad copy on the back of the box, you are going to die here. Today. Alone in this cold forest where the light of joy does not shine. Please flee. I have to say that for legal reasons. Please flee. I have to say it twice. This goes for all of you. By reading the rest of this article you are agreeing to enter into binding arbitration for all past and future crimes Decipher, Inc. commits on you and your descendents.

Brockway: I have read every single word on all ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY cards in this very sexual CCG about a Canadian comedian’s childhood perception of his father, and I can tell you this in advance: “Four-play” is the cutest joke in here.

You will die in these woods.

I’m sorry, legally I have to repeat that one more time so you can’t possibly say you thought I was joking in a court of law.

Seanbaby: I want to keep following the chain of custody on these “laughs.” This is an uninspired sequel to a parody movie already quoted to death by everyone’s worst classmates and co-workers. Then it got adapted into a card game by board game nerds who had to live among those quotes for months. They had to translate them into upkeep phases and meeple placement, play test them, and rewrite them. This is like a Big Bang Theory watch party who died in a gas leak and trying to chew a laugh from the asshole of the coyote who fed on them.

Brockway: There it is. That’s the appropriate level of disgust. Okay, good, I was waiting for you to get your revulsion calibrated before we got into the real troubling stuff. Let’s begin. We’re going to delve into the game mechanics first. There are six colors of cards and you must have exactly five of each. It’s the comedy rule of thirties!

Seanbaby: “Pick five of each color, in the spring we’d make meat helmets.” Maybe I’m some kind of card genius, but what I just said was 5 times faster and still 58% Austin Powers quote.

Brockway: You’ve got the vibe. It’s like this the whole way down: a brutal mental war between rote comedy and resource management taking place inside an underpaid game designer’s atrophying brain. It’s the bad ending they deleted from Psychonauts 3.

It’s inhumane to do this to a person, so if this game was lazy, if the designer phoned it in, I could understand that. It’s not. It’s the hardest I’ve ever seen anyone try for guaranteed failure. It’s like doing a screaming ten episode Dragon Ball Z powerup just to puke out a cat turd. You can feel how much it hurt this person’s professional pride to make the Austin Powers CCG, but they fucking killed themselves doing it anyway. And then they built that exhaustion into the game itself like Chinese laborer skeletons in the Great Wall.

Brockway: “We can’t just say points,” the weary game designer said. “What does Austin Powers have that’s like points?”

He waited for an answer from an empty room, because if he had loved ones they would have saved him from this.

“Mojo,” he finally told himself. “I guess points are Mojo.”

“And what’s victory?” He asked no one.

His eyes became distant, as though listening to an answer.

“Ha, that’s pretty good. But I don’t think ‘the fleeting moment of delusion in between crushing defeats’ will fit on the card. I’m going to write ‘wearing the Daddy pants.’”

Seanbaby: “In the next game you play” is almost grotesque in its optimism. It’s like saying, “When your wife’s divorce lawyer tries to kiss you” or “There will still be people in your life after you invited them to play The Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me Collectible Card Game.”

Brockway: Okay, there. We’ve calibrated your bleakness. Now we can get to the actual cards. You’re going to want to put up the Austin Powers: International Panel of Plasticry™ between yourself and the computer screen, or else you’ll get shards of glass in your hands when you reflexively attack it for showing you this.

Brockway: Take a closer look at that Happenings card-

Brockway: Whenever this card is laid down, all players must disgrace their ancestors. They do this by “making an evil pinky smirk,” like an embarrassing uncle trying to connect with high school girls in the TCBY parking lot. Players have to do this as fast as they can, because the game designer hoped to trick a few of them into punching themselves in the teeth. It was the best and only revenge he could manage, using the card-based skills God granted him.

Seanbaby: This is a fight. If you do this shit near me, I’m putting my fist through your mouth and memories. I hate this for every reason. It’s toddler day camp nonsense, sure, but is it also a misprint? It says “Bridal Shower” but the text and picture don’t seem to have anything to do with bridal showers. I guess it doesn’t matter, because like I said, if you play this card anywhere near me my karate rage is your much more urgent problem.

Brockway: Aren’t you glad I made you buy the Austin Powers: International Panel of Plasticry™ first? It didn’t save your cat, but your monitor still works great!

Anyway, don’t worry. That pinky stunt is not indicative of the game mechanics. That’s just a “fun” little aside for grandparents tricked into playing it. When I say there are deep mechanics to the Austin Powers CCG, I mean shit like this:

Brockway: All Agent or Frickin’ Bone cards can either Shag or Assassinate, but only if they’re radiating the correct kind of Vibes needed to power said Shag. Swinger cards tie struggling jokes from the movies to game alterations that reverse play, force disards, or alter Vibe distribution. Happenings dictate physical actions and punish other players, moreso than God already is-

Seanbaby: Use your Swedish-Made Penis Enlarger Pump (this kind of thing is in your bag, baby) to trace the path from your Randy agent to their Shag target. If it intersects any Fat Bastard or Stool Sample cards, your target is considered partially Cock-Blocked and you must Mojo with Disadvantage, baby. Pause gameplay until no player has an erection, use the included Margaret Thatcher Naked on a Cold Day Card as necessar– wait, where the fuck am I? What the fuck just happened?

Brockway: Oh, it’s the curse. I didn’t mention the curse. The designer of this game died of such intense despair that the echo of his emotional trauma lives on through the cards. It’s overwriting the parts of your brain that used to process children’s laughter and summer days.

I think we’ve calibrated your impotence in the face of overwhelming tragedy. You’re ready. Let’s move on to the real heart of the gameplay. Of course I’m talking about “Frickin’ Bone” cards that players can “throw.”

Welcome to the cold forest, buddy!

Seanbaby: “What. Sorry, I’ve seen this movie but I don’t… I’m just really confused,” says your friend’s wife.

“My card is trying to fuck your card,” you tell her. It’s horrible. Your words hang in the air like the stink of a mass grave. “Also, this Austin Powers quote,” you recite. It makes it worse, so much worse.

Brockway: You’re not joking. The ruleset actually demands you read all the quotes out loud in your best impression, and they’re all here. Every single catchphrase in the Austin Powers series is now a card, complete with full Vibe stats and Mojo ratings-

Brockway: Let me explain how it works. For example, if I were to tell you my Frickin’ Bone card “Oh, behave!” is worth 15 Mojo on a successful Shag, you might slap me full force without realizing what you were doing. That’s just a natural fight or flight reflex, because your body recognized that I was a threat before your brain did.

Seanbaby: These are the fucking cards!? This isn’t a game. This is the autopsied brain of a parakeet who starved to death while this DVD menu was looping. I would rather you handed me the murder weapon from an outhouse stabbing than another card from this game.

Brockway: That’s weird, your rage should’ve been taken from you back in the Vibe stage. We must not’ve calibrated right.

Anyway “Get in my BELLY,” the phrase that still haunts the therapy sessions of people who were chubby in the late ‘90s, provides two Shagadelic Vibes if used to Shag, but only 1 Randy and 1 Creepy Vibe if used to Assassinate. Fucking fuck YOU, and fuck this shit a Gex writers room would’ve rejected.

Oh hey, I can still feel anger, too? What a lovely surprise. A bright red flower in a dead and salted field.

Seanbaby: In the following thesis, I postulate how the Austin Powers CCG “I ate a BABY!” card represents a total victory against happiness. It commemorates a desperate, incoherent line written and delivered as if it would ever be a t-shirt. Pulled from context like this, it amplifies how there never was any. The script simply called for the obese man to eat something silly and they landed on a thing neither silly nor simple. A sudden child-murdering cannibal is no non-sequitur. It begs questions more important than the movie he’s interrupting. How much more of this film was written not in the interest of narrative or the craft of comedy? For a 6th grader to repeat until Dude Where’s My Car is relea– god damn it, what? Where am I again? Why does this keep happening?

Brockway: Your brain is still trying to fight back. It’s cute!

And you’re right: Breaking any joke down into a card game mechanic is an elegant system for slaughtering comedy. Likewise “Throw me a frickin’ bone here!” was never really anything. It was half of somebody else’s catchphrase said in a weird voice, and maybe that was enough in the 1990s. But when the game manual pauses for eight straight paragraphs to explain Frickin’ Bone play, there can be no mistake: The game designers hate this fucking movie their kids won’t stop quoting, and they want its corpse mutilated so its soul can’t enter heaven.

Seanbaby: Other players can get involved in your seduction attacks? I am 20% sure this was a group sex game reskinned to be about Austin Powers over a very sad, very dream-crushing weekend.

Brockway: If you get pregnant from an Austin Powers CCG orgy you have to give birth by C-section because the baby will not consent to enter the world that spawned it. It will leave clawmarks on the inside of the womb if you try to induce. Hey, is that too dark? I don’t remember light. I’ve been here too long, in this place where every tortured joke is dissected and spread across a full page of technical writing, like the segmented horse from The Cell.

You remember the long “names that are synonyms for penis” montage? It was kind of funny in the first movie. Not for its strained double entendres, but because they carried the joke on so long it passed beyond painful and became admirable. Then Austin Powers did it again and again, proving they never actually got what was funny about it, it was all an accident. That’s mirrored in the gameplay! Not just the joke – but the ensuing tedium and destruction of goodwill.

Brockway: When somebody lays this card, the game traps ALL players into a feedback loop that could potentially go on forever. So it starts out fun at first, and then joy turns to ash as you ceaselessly play Johnson after Dong after One-Eyed Monster until you all finally realize no days have passed, you died in that bus crash and the sun never rises in the cold forest.

Seanbaby: You’d think it would come back around. They took an endurance dick joke, explained it, killed it, cremated it, and smeared its ashes across a board game. By this point, you should admire their dedication. But you don’t. This is grandma starting the same story she just told from her tracheostomy hole.

Brockway: I want you to picture the following interaction. Truly bring it to life in your mind.

It’s 1999. You’re babysitting a 13 year old who should be too mature for a babysitter, but definitely isn’t. You allow him to pick the game you play if he agrees to be in bed by 9 so you can watch Girl, Interrupted and make out with a guy who drives a Dodge Neon.

He lays these two cards-

So you go for your turn and he says, “ExSQUEEZE me! A baking powder? I have played my Heather Graham bikini card, so you MUST discard your I Ate a Baby. Now, because I have an active Felicity, I lay my Cherry-”

I know all of you reading this are practicing nerds. I know you’re mostly kind or, failing that, physically weak. Are you seriously telling me you would allow the rest of that sentence to be finished? You would attack! You would attack to keep this aberration’s mutant seed from spreading. Not even consciously, but out of a genetic instinct to protect the unseen future world of your progeny.

Seanbaby: And you’d be free the next day. The worst, most overworked public defender could prove this game was a sex crime. Unless, of course, the DA countered with a higher mojo’ed Frickin’ Bone card such as an upgraded “I’m With It, I’m Hip, Tuka-Tuka Tuka-Tuka Tuka-Tuka Tuka-Tuka.” I don’t feel comfortable being sarcastic about this game. That’s probably a real card, and a real rule.

Brockway: Good instincts. You cannot make up a comedic low bar for the Austin Powers CCG. Everyone and everything in these movies has been turned into a card. There’s no way New Line truly appreciated the implications of signing over total use of the IP when they asked Decipher to burn months of their lives for this-

Brockway: Sure, Seth Green would love it. To become a meaningless collectible, a forgotten waste of time and resources quickly rendered valueless by the natural progression of society. It’s his brand now. But fucking-

Brockway: You can’t do this to Elvis Costello! There’s no way he foresaw this when he signed up for a fun cameo in a spy comedy. You go fucking tell him he’s worth 25 Mojo and free to play with an Active Felicity. He’ll spit in your mouth before you finish speaking.

Seanbaby: They gave him a point of Creepy! The maniacs who made a fantasy sex/murder game with a Heather Graham bikini card gave Elvis Costello a point of Creepy! That’s like a bus masturbator giving Elvis Costello a point of Creepy.

Brockway: It’s not the game designer’s fault. He was mostly card by this point. He was just doing his best to understand life in terms of the Austin Powers CCG that ate his brain. It’s not just people, like poor Elvis Costello, but broad human behavior outside of the movies. I am speaking, of course, about the homosexuality mechanic.

Seanbaby: Ongoing effects continue to apply as long as agents who have “come to embrace the love that dare not speak its name” are active? These are not rules. This is a maze of indelicate homophobia. And speaking of, I bet I could have called two cards gay faster than this in 1999.

Brockway: “There are gays in Austin Powers,” the game designer speaks, but of course they’re not his words anymore.

“The lesbian mechanic is obvious: Lesbian Agents can Shag females and must only Assassinate males. But how does bisexuality modify play?”

His answer and only friend is silence.

“You’re right,” he tells silence. “Bisexuals can only be Shagged by female cards when in the presence of a Lesbian Agent.”

Seanbaby: Bisexuals are just confused assassins who don’t know they’re CTETLTDNSIN y– hold on, where am I again? How did– okay, why is there a gay joke on my screen, in 2024, based on a clumsy euphemism in a rule exception for a CCG based on Austin Powers:The Spy Who Shagged Me? And I think this next sentence is some kind of pun based on that? In card games, this is called “homo-errata.” Fuck! What!? How!? Is Seth Green doing this!?

Brockway: You’re right. Somehow Seth Green is the game designer now. I can’t and don’t want to explain it. What’s important is that we’ve found the exact moment where Seth Green could no longer access normal human life. He built his own prison out of the Austin Powers CCG, and discarded its key to turn Fat Bastard Eats Turkey Leg into an NFT. Even if Seth Green wanted to end this farce, to escape the cold forest once and for all, he physically can’t do it. Because he has no Active Felicity, and cannot radiate the necessary Creepy Vibes for a Self Assassination.

“Fook Yu!” he might wail, using the only language left to him. “Oh, no. Oh. Oh, behave. Oh. Fook Mi. Fook Mi. God Fook us all.”

Seanbaby: I ate a BABY. No. I ate a BABY. Brockway, I ate a BABY. You know I ate a BABY. What you have to do, BABY. I ate a SHOOT. I ate a ME.