---
date: 240103
category: ote
---

My interest in ON THE EDGE goes back to 1994 or thereabouts.  As a 
child, I was deeply succeptable to the allure of the burgeoning 
Collectable Card Game scam.  My friends and I went all-in on early 
editions of Magic: the Gathering (regrettably not early or cognizant-
ly enough to retire on the value of those collections), but also the 
would-be competitors and successors of the era.  JYHAD, the Vampire: 
the Masquerade game was dark and moody.  WYVERN went accessibly deep-
er into the fantasy realm, Dungeons & Dragons being untouchable and 
inscrutable to a ten-year-old.  STAR TREK CUSTOMIZABLE CARD GAME was 
Star Trek, in a customizable card game format.  My favorite, though, 
was the thoroughly weird ON THE EDGE.

Taking place on the fictional Mediterranean isle of Al Amarja (and 
ostensibly based on a TTRPG, but I didn't care about any of that), 
the packs bloomed with psychic weirdos, mutant cabbies, skeezy poli-
ticians, human-hijacking aliens, something called Burgers, and on and
on.  I didn't understand a lick of it, but I amassed a little coll-
ection of these cyphers and would rifle through them periodically, 
maybe convincing a buddy to play a game once or twice.  Then we 
moved, I stashed the cards somewhere, and didn't think about it for 
thirty years.

A few weeks back, a Discord pal shared a photo of, like, five boxes 
of the stuff.  Memories of fringe scientists and baboon-patrolled 
barrios (and looking up "barrio" in the dictionary at school) crashed
ashore.  My exact response was, "fuck! on the edge was so good."  As
it turns out, Atlas Games still has a bunch of it, and boxes go up on
eBay for as low as $16 from time to time.  Within 24 hours, I had an 
assortment box (the "Burger Box") on the way.  Shortly after I tore 
through those packs, a box of Standard Edition boosters hit my door-
step.  For the past week, I've been opening, organizing, and catalog-
ing them in a Notion database.  My hope is to, if not revitalize int-
erest in the thirty-year-dead game, keep some documentation going 
where much of that has vanished from the Internet.  There's a lot of 
potential for pick-up games at conventions, sealed deck matches, 
booster drafts, sure, but the story that unfolds by cracking 60 con-
secutive booster packs has been well worth the pittance.

-30-