It’s a bit unnerving spending mucho dollars on collectible card games at the best of times. You know you want them but is it real? You can feel the scoffers scoff in your head. Still more when you are buying cards for a game that isn’t even finished yet.

The new DR Who: Worlds Apart game is my latest foray, and this time it’s different. All the cards are NFTs  - unique instances of cards stored in the Ethereum blockchain, which explains everything doesn’t it?  Essentially, they are secure digital objects, each with their own unique code.  And the first packs have frames round them that are limited edition – they’ll never be minted again.

So once The DR Who Worlds Apart game starts up for real in its free to play version many millions will play it and many of those will wish to buy these unique, unobtainable except from people like me, cards with the limited edition frames with names like Glitch Angel and Imperial Dalek and rather fetching cyber designs to boot.

Of course it’s one thing when the scoffers are in your head, but quite another when you enthusiastically, if ill advisedly,  tell your wife, about your new investment, getting in (nearly) on the ground floor. This provoked unwelcome and frankly intrusive questions about how much I spend on things like this and wine and books.
I have three grown up sons, the eldest of which has reframed my canny crypto investements before as “Gambling, dad, gambling”. Never mind that he made thousands out of his early Bitcoin purchase.

No I had thought he would gently sigh when I told him about this – after all when his younger brother and I played Magic The Gathering Online he was aghast that we actually bought cards that we didn’t really own. His reaction was in fact, trenchant, a little cryptic, better than just describing it here it is:

“NFT huh? Really trying to BE the greater fool?”

It remains to be seen. By and large unless the Dr Who: Worlds Apart game totally bombs I still think I’ll be quids in. It’s actually, from the look of it, quite a good game, which you will be able to play for free and do well in, so they say. Backed by the BBC its credentials seem fairly safe, and DR Who is a global phenomenon.

I didn’t watch the first ever episode of Dr Who in 1963 because I was at an eight year old birthday party, but from the second one onwards I never missed an episode until I upped and left home in 1974. I never quite hid behind the sofa with the daleks, but it was a near thing.

So I’ve got more reasons than just crypto investment to buy the packs and I will play the game.