• Shuffle your deck and draw a starting hand of 7 cards. Put the rest of your deck face-down in front of you.
• If you don't have a Basic Pokémon card in your hand (it'll say "Basic Pokémon" in the upper left-hand corner), show your hand to your opponent, shuffle it back into your deck, and draw 7 new cards. Your opponent may then draw up to 2 extra cards. If you still don't have any Basic Pokémon in your new hand, you repeat this process, but your opponent gets to draw up to 2 extra cards each time!
• You and your opponent each choose a Basic Pokémon card from your hands and put them face-down. These will be your starting Active Pokémon.
• Each player may, if he or she wishes, choose up to 5 Basic Pokémon from his or her hand and put them face-down on his or her Bench (this is where Pokémon wait when they're not the Active Pokémon).
• Put the top 6 cards of your deck face-down in front of you. These are your Prizes, which you take when your opponent's Pokémon are Knocked Out. You can't look at a Prize card until you take it.
• Flip a coin to decide who goes first. You can use your special Pokémon coin, if you have one.
• Flip over all the Active and Benched Pokémon that have been put on the table.

Be sure to leave room for your discard pile. All of your cards that get discarded during the game, no matter how they get discarded, will go there.

During the game, you'll be putting more and more cards on the table. All the cards on the table that are in the Active Pokémon area or on the Bench are referred to as being "in play." Your deck, your Prizes, and the cards in your discard pile are not considered to be "in play."

Pokémon cards, Evolution cards, and Energy cards will be on the table - "in play" - after you play them from your hand. You can keep using those cards in play turn after turn. Trainer cards, though, are used once and then discarded.

Let's Play!

* ©1995, 1996, and 1998 Nintendo, Creatures, GAMEFREAK. Pokémon, Game Boy, Gotta catch 'em all!, and the official Nintendo seal are trademarks of Nintendo.
©1999 Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

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