Somewhere out past the dock there is a lake that does not have fish in it. It has wax.

REEL COLLECTIBLES is a 16-bit game about fishing packs of baseball cards out of the water and filing every last one of them into a binder. Cast, fight whatever has taken the bait, tear the wrapper, flip eight cards one at a time, and find out whether you just pulled a common outfielder or the one card that decade is famous for.

Fifty years of cards. 1950 to 1999. 14,645 of them. Every player, team and card company is invented for this game, which means nobody has already written the price guide.

Fish it up

Everything in your collection came out of the water. Cast a line, wait through the fake nibbles, set the hook, then win the fight: your catch zone sits in the middle of the gauge while the hooked "?" sweeps up and down, and you press to stop it inside. Heavy catches need more hooks set and sweep faster with every one. Old cards fight harder than new ones. Miss three times and the line snaps.

How cleanly you land it decides what condition the cards arrive in. A perfect catch bumps every card in the pack up a tier. A two-miss scrape hands you a waterlogged pack.

Six pieces of water, six different ponds

Take the boat out on the lake map and pick your spot. The narrows, the spillway, the flats, the island, each one fishes differently: what bites, how long you wait, whether the deep stuff is even down there. None of them is the best one. Where you fish is a real trade, the same as which rod you bought and which bait is on the hook.

The binder

Decade, year, 3x3 pages, exactly like the real thing. New cards file themselves. Duplicates route to the trade box automatically, and a better-condition dupe swaps in and bumps the old copy out. Fifty complete checklists to chase, and every one of them has a grail card that only shows up with fireworks.

Send it off to CGA

Post a card away to the Collectors Grading Authority and wait. It comes back sealed in a slab with a number on it. A high grade is worth far more than the raw card. A low one is worse than never having sent it, and it is permanent. The grade is locked in the moment you post it, so reloading will not save you.

Twenty-five things that are not cards

The pond coughs up junk, and occasionally it coughs up something else. A chipped batting helmet. A scorched ball. A corked bottle with a 1919 contract still folded inside it. There is one of each, ever, and the best of them will not bite in the shallows at all.

428 awards on nine shelves

Finish a year's set. Collect one club's entire history. Every shortstop of the 1970s. The men who lasted twenty seasons. Each award is a real badge with a name and a place on the wall, and it turns up in a popup that will not be ignored.

Down at the dock

The lake has a small-time carnival attached to it. Spin the prize plane's wheel. Play the passing jetski's keno board, where every ball that hits one of your numbers floats up a sealed pack. Hit the barrel-boost slot machine for a timed fishing buff. Take on the travelling barge's BIG BOARD, where the light coasts five squares past wherever you pressed and a skunk takes your entire bank.

Also in the box

[list]

• Every set has its own look, frames and colour schemes that drift decade by decade, and the wax matches the cards inside it

• Sal's shop: better rods for a bigger catch zone and mintier cards, better bait for faster bites and richer packs

• Sell your dupes for coins, or spend trade-box value at the counter to buy the one card you are missing

• An auto-opener for when you are sitting on forty packs and just want the hits

• Chiptune soundtrack, and everything on screen is clickable

All players, teams, and card companies in Reel Collectibles are fictional.