Play Pokémon TCG Live on Linux

 

As you might have noticed, I enjoy using Linux Mint on my computer. And I enjoy the Pokémon Trading Card Game. The quite enjoyable Pokémon TCG Live is an online game where you can play virtual cards against people around the world, and even have a great learning tutorial if you are new. 

Anyway, as always, Linux is not supported. But thanks to the great people behind Wine and winecharm, I got it running on my Linux partition. But it is quite the ride, so buckle up. 

Grab the latest Windows version of TCG Live from pokemon.com 

Open the installer in winecharm by clicking open

Run the installer, but DO NOT LAUNCH at the final screen. Click finish.

Start the app as you normally would, by clicking play-button.

When you en up with the "Log in to Pokémon Central", it should open Firefox if you have this as your default Linux browser. 

Right click in your browser, click inspect, click console. It should end up showing you a long string:

Copy that to your clipboard.

In winecharm, click the options wheel, open terminal. 

cd into drive_c/users

find your username, enter that, cd The\ Pokémon\ Company\ International/

cd  cd Pokémon\ Trading\ Card\ Game\ Live/

Then comes the magic, with the Pokémon TCG Live you used to log in still running in the background and the "Log in to try more features screen":

wine "Pokemon TCG Live.exe" "tpcitcgapp://callback?code=bla bla REPLACE ALL OF THIS WITH YOUR LONG STRING" 

This will use web hooks to open the app with you secret login secret, and pass it to your running app waiting for that login secret. Remember to replace the second part of the command with your login secret within " "

 

And if you are a Pokémon Professor, you can even get Tournament Operations Manager running on linux