How to play the Pokémon TCG: the rules, in one read

This one has nothing to do with TCG Tools directly — it's just the rules, for anyone who picked up a deck and needs the actual game explained before any of the strategy posts on this blog make sense.

What's in a deck

A legal deck is exactly 60 cards, built from three card types:

Pokémon cards — what you play, attack with, and lose when they take enough damage.
Trainer cards — Items, Supporters, Stadiums, and Tools. These do everything that isn't attacking: draw cards, search your deck, heal, disrupt your opponent.
Energy cards — attached to Pokémon to pay for their attacks.

There's no minimum on any one type beyond needing enough Basic Pokémon to actually start the game.

Setup

Shuffle your deck, draw 7 cards, and choose one Basic Pokémon from your hand to be your Active Pokémon — the one that fights. You can put up to 5 more Basic Pokémon on your Bench, face up, as backups. Then set aside the top 6 cards of your deck, face down, as your Prize cards — you don't look at these until you take them.

If your opening hand has no Basic Pokémon at all, you have to show your opponent your hand, shuffle it back in, and draw a new one — a mulligan.

How a turn works

Each turn, you draw a card, then can do any of the following in any order:

Play Basic Pokémon from your hand onto your Bench
Evolve a Pokémon that's been in play since the start of your turn (not one you just played this turn)
Attach one Energy card to any of your Pokémon
Play Trainer cards (only one Supporter per turn)
Retreat your Active Pokémon to the Bench, paying its retreat cost in Energy, and promote a Benched Pokémon in its place

Once you attack, your turn ends — only your Active Pokémon can attack, and only once.

Damage and knockouts

Attacks deal damage, tracked with damage counters on the card. When a Pokémon has taken damage equal to or greater than its HP, it's knocked out and goes to the discard pile. Whoever knocked it out takes one of their own Prize cards into their hand — that Prize now counts as a resource for the rest of the game, not just a scorekeeping token.

(Some Pokémon are worth more than one Prize when knocked out — that's set by the specific card, not a general rule, so check the card itself.)

How you actually win

There are three ways a game ends:

You take all of your Prize cards. Once your last one is gone, you win.
Your opponent has no Pokémon left in play. If their Active Pokémon is knocked out and they have nothing on the Bench to promote, they lose on the spot.
Your opponent can't draw. If it's their turn and their deck is empty when they need to draw, they lose.

Everything else in the game — type matchups, Stadiums, Special Conditions, evolution lines — sits on top of these fundamentals. Once the basic loop clicks, the rest is just learning what the cards in front of you actually do.

If you're at the point where you're building your own deck and want to know whether it actually holds up before you take it to a table, that's exactly what TCG Tools is for.