Tomb Raider CCG

Tomb Raider CCG launched at the absolute commercial peak of Lara Croft, riding the run between Tomb Raider III (1998) and the first Angelina Jolie film, when the character was on magazine covers, soft drinks, and every tie-in product shelf.

The game

Published in 1999 by Precedence Entertainment and distributed by the U.S. Playing Card Company, Tomb Raider CCG is a two-player adventuring duel. Each player pilots a Raider (Lara by default, but the expansions added rivals like Werner Von Croy and Pierre DuPont) through a tomb built from shared Site cards, scoring points by Artifacts recovered while trading gunfire and traps across the table.

The context

This sat squarely in the late-90s licensed-CCG boom that also produced Austin Powers, X-Files, and the Simpsons card games. Precedence was already running Babylon 5 and Terminator, and Tomb Raider was their bid at a female-audience action line. The photography on the cards came directly from Core Design's official render kits, so it looks and reads like a contemporary magazine spread rather than commissioned art.

The collector angle

The main print runs were the Tomb Raider base set, plus the Premiere expansion. A standalone Dark Angel expansion was planned around the Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness game tie-in but the Precedence collapse and the subsequent Angel of Darkness commercial failure killed it before release, and playtest copies are the trophy pulls for the hardcore. The foil Lara promos handed out at Comic-Con 2000 and GenCon 2001 are the cleanest to find. Lara-render cards with the early polygonal low-poly model pre-date the franchise reboot, which gives them a nostalgic visual appeal beyond the gameplay.