overtheedge | Stuffed Crocodile

Throwback: On the Edge

5 Comments Posted by Geoffrey on July 29, 2025

Remember those heady days just after Magic: The Gathering came out, when all of a sudden any TTRPG related publisher decided to push out their own trading card game?

Well, so does Atlas Games it seems, who have been sitting on unopened “On the Edge” boxes for the last 30 years and are still selling them, for pennies on the dollar by this point.

I’m not sure why I thought it was a good idea to order them, but now I would have enough to I don’t know, run a draft tourney or build a cube or something.

On the Edge is the trading card game for Over the Edge, a rather surreal conspiracy RPG set on an island somewhere in the Med. It’s basically X-files crossed with Burroughs’ Interzone.

Now Over the Edge was a popular but definitely niche RPG in the 90s, but it hardly was what I would have called ripe material for a trading card game. Back in the days it had 2 editions, and a few years ago they published and updated version for the 21st century. But back then was a weird time, and so trading card games popped out from everywhere. There was a Deadlands TCG after all, there even was a Das Schwarze Auge one which seemed to miss the whole point of what made Magic work so well.

Still, the On the Edge game managed to get a main set and 4 expansions. Unfortunately it never seems to have sold all that much, but unlike other companies Atlas Games seems to be unwilling to let go of a good idea that easy (and I didn’t say the game wasn’t good, just that the property wasn’t all that ready for a TCG and it definitely got lost in the shuffle). So they are still selling it. In 2025!

Quick calculation: I bought the big packages for 20 bucks each. They sold in 1995 for $117, which equals about $247 in 2025 money. Which means they were basically marked down to $10 in ’95 money.
At one point you have to wonder if AG isn’t losing money storing these things for three decades.

“The object of the game is now to arrange 6 or more cards in a row so that the first letters of their first names spell out an English word. First player to do so wins, […]”

This is from the The Cut-Ups Project expansion, which tries to gamify surrealism.

Now of course the issue is that I might need someone to actually play this game with me. At least thanks to the low price I have enough cards to actually do that, something I can’t say for my unsuccessful ventures into the Star Trek: TNG and Babylon 5 Trading Card Games.