Six prizes, and everything else.

At the start of the game you set aside the top six cards of your deck, face down, without looking. Those are your Prize cards. Every time you knock out one of your opponent's Pokémon, you take one of them into your hand. Take all six and you win.

That's it. That's the game. Two other things also win it for you, and both come up more often than beginners expect:

Keep the six-prize race in your head as you read the rest. Every decision in a turn is really the question does this get me closer to six, or stop them getting closer to six?

Shuffle your sixty cards, draw seven, and look for a Basic Pokémon — the unevolved kind, the one that doesn't say Stage 1 or Stage 2 in the corner. You need at least one to start.

• No Basic in hand? Say so, shuffle your hand back in, and draw seven again. That's a mulligan, and it costs you nothing except tempo — your opponent draws an extra card for each one you take.
• Put one Basic face down as your Active Pokémon. That's your fighter. It's the only Pokémon that can attack, and the only one that can be attacked, unless a card says otherwise.
• Up to five more Basics go on the Bench, also face down. The Bench is where evolution happens, where energy gets stockpiled, and where your replacement sits when the Active gets knocked out.
• Set six Prize cards aside, face down, off the top of your deck. Don't look.
• Flip everything face up and start.

A turn has three parts and the third one closes the door. Once you attack, your turn is over — so everything you wanted to do this turn has to happen before it.

1. Draw one card. Not optional. If you can't, you lose.
2. Do as much as you like, in any order. Play Pokémon to the Bench, evolve, attach energy, use Abilities, play Trainer cards, retreat.
3. Attack — or pass. Either way, that's the end.

Then comes Pokémon Checkup, which belongs to neither player and is where poison and burns and sleep resolve. Chapter seven covers it, because getting the Checkup wrong is one of the most common beginner mistakes.

Four things you get exactly one of

Item cards are not on that list. You can play as many Items as you like in a turn, and a chain of cheap Items is how experienced players turn a bad hand into a good one. If you're stuck, look at your Items again before you pass.

Every card in a Pokémon deck is one of three things. The Trainer category is where the confusion lives, because its four sub-types follow completely different rules.

To evolve, you put the Stage 1 or Stage 2 card from your hand directly on top of the Pokémon it evolves from. It's not a new Pokémon — it's the same one, wearing a bigger card.

One more thing that surprises people: an evolved Pokémon can only use the attacks and Abilities printed on its own card. The Stage 1's attacks are gone the moment the Stage 2 lands on top.

Your Active Pokémon uses one attack per turn. It needs the energy shown in the cost — exactly that or more — and then damage happens in a fixed six-step order. The order is the whole chapter, because applying the same modifiers in a different sequence produces a different number, and that number is often the game.

Damage is placed as counters worth 10 each. When a Pokémon's damage reaches its printed HP, it's knocked out: it and everything attached go to the discard pile, and the attacker takes their Prize cards.

After a turn ends, both players resolve Pokémon Checkup together. This is where the Special Conditions do their work, and it happens in a fixed order:

Poisoned → Burned → Asleep → Paralyzed → other Checkup effects → check for knockouts.

Beginners resolve conditions on their own turn, in whatever order they notice them. That's wrong twice over, and with poison and burn stacked on the same Pokémon it changes whether something survives.

Once per turn you may retreat: discard energy from your Active Pokémon equal to its printed Retreat Cost, then swap it with a Pokémon on your Bench. Three things stop you:

• You don't have enough energy attached to pay the cost.
• Your Bench is empty — there's nothing to swap to.
• Your Active is Asleep or Paralyzed. Those two conditions specifically lock retreating.

What travels to the Bench with it: remaining energy, any Tool, and all its damage counters. What gets left behind: every Special Condition, and any effect from an attack.

The two opening turns follow different rules, deliberately, to stop the player who wins the coin flip from also winning the game. Four separate facts, and they are scattered across the official material rather than stated in one place:

So going second buys you a Supporter and an attack one turn earlier; going first buys you an extra energy attachment over the course of the game. Neither is strictly better, which is the point.

The no-evolution-on-turn-one rule is stated in the official Advanced Player's Rulebook. The no-attack and no-Supporter restrictions for the first player are documented on Bulbapedia rather than in the rulebook I could reach — see chapter fifteen.

A constructed deck is exactly sixty cards. Not fifty-nine, not sixty-one. Two rules govern what goes in them, and after that you're in the land of convention rather than law:

Everything else you'll read about deckbuilding — how much energy to run, how many Supporters, the ratio of Basics to evolutions — is community convention, not rules. Useful convention, often good convention, but nobody official has published it, so treat "run twelve energy" as advice rather than law.

Booster packs are the worst way to start playing and the best way to start collecting, and the two get confused constantly. If your goal is to play a game this week, buy something with a finished deck inside it.

Prices move and product lines change; this is a description of what exists, not shopping advice. There's no affiliate link on this page and there never will be.

Organised play mostly uses the Standard format, and what makes a card Standard-legal is the small regulation mark printed in the bottom-left corner of the card. Not the set. Not the year. The letter.

New sets become tournament-legal roughly two weeks after release, which is why the set on the shelf isn't always the set in the tournament. The 2026 sets, all part of the Mega Evolution series, were Ascended Heroes (January), Perfect Order (March), Chaos Rising (May) and Pitch Black (July).

Format rules and regulation marks: Play! Pokémon — Rules & Formats. The next rotation has not been announced; see chapter fifteen.

Pokémon TCG Pocket is a different game that shares a name and an art style. It's a fine game. It is not a tutorial for this one, and arriving from it with its habits intact is now one of the most common ways to be confused at a table.

Confusion also behaves differently between the two games. If a rule you're sure about came from Pocket, check it before you argue about it.

Organised play runs through Play! Pokémon, and the ladder is gentler than it looks from outside. You need a free Player ID and a local store; everything else is optional.

Players are split into three age divisions by birth year, which roll over each July with the new season — so check the current cut-offs on the official page rather than trusting any guide, including this one.

Find a store, a League or a Prerelease near you with the official Pokémon Event Locator. What each event type is, in Play! Pokémon's own words: Local Pokémon TCG Tournaments. Getting a Player ID: Getting Started.

Every guide on this site ships one of these. Here's where the ground is soft.

• Two rules here come from Bulbapedia, not an official page. The exact damage from Burned and Poisoned, the ×2 / −30 values for Weakness and Resistance, and the first player's no-attack / no-Supporter restrictions are all correct as far as I can establish — but The Pokémon Company's own site blocks automated access, and the official rulebook I could reach states where those modifiers apply without stating their size. If you find any of it contradicted by a printed rulebook in a box you own, the box wins, and I'd like to know.
• Weakness and Resistance values are printed per card. There is no chart. Cards from Diamond & Pearl through Sword & Shield carry different values from current ones.
• The next Standard rotation has not been announced. Anything telling you a date for it is guessing.
• Energy counts and deck ratios are convention. No official guidance exists. This guide won't invent any.
• Age division cut-offs move every July. Check the official page.
• No tier lists, no card evaluations, no prices. They rot faster than anything else and this guide is not maintained weekly.
• This is the physical card game. Pokémon TCG Live follows the same rules; Pokémon TCG Pocket does not.

Written against the game as it stood in August 2026, after the April 2026 rotation and the release of Pitch Black. If something here has aged badly, tell me and I'll fix it.