Pin High (1996): The Golf Card Game from the Australian Bush
This series has crossed from Indiana to Wisconsin, from Virginia to North Dakota, from Toronto to Southern California. Now we’re going as far as a golf card game can take us — to the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, Australia.
Pin High was created in 1996 by Adrace Industries Pty Ltd, operating out of a P.O. Box in Ferny Creek, Victoria — a tiny community nestled in the mountains about 30 kilometers east of Melbourne. Ferny Creek sits at the edge of Sherbrooke Forest, surrounded by towering mountain ash trees, fern gullies, and the kind of scenery that makes you forget a city of five million people is just down the hill.
It’s about as far from a typical game company headquarters as you can imagine. And that’s exactly what makes it perfect for this series.
The Box
Pin High comes in a clean box with 54 quality cards — slightly oversized compared to standard poker cards — and a detailed instruction booklet. The front reads: “The Golfing Card Game for 2, 3 & 4 players. For Golfers & Non Golfers.” One side says “Trademark of Adrace Industries. Proudly developed, designed & made in Australia.” The other carries the copyright and P.O. Box address.
“Proudly developed, designed & made in Australia.” That line does a lot of work. It tells you this isn’t a mass-market import. It’s homegrown. Someone in the Dandenong Ranges made this with their own hands and put it in a box.
How It Plays
Pin High is a match-play golf simulation played on imaginary courses — and not just any courses. The rulebook includes hole-by-hole yardages for famous courses around the world: Augusta, Muirfield, Pebble Beach, Royal Melbourne, Royal Sydney. You can also play your own local course if you know the distances.
Each hand represents a hole. Players use Stroke cards to “hit” their ball from the tee toward the cup. Different cards represent different clubs — drivers, woods, irons, pitching wedges, sand wedges — each with specific distances. Once you’re within 20 metres of the cup, you’re on the green and switch to Putt cards to hole out.
The twist that makes Pin High unique in this series: 13 Penalty cards. These aren’t penalties against you — they’re weapons you play against your opponents. Put someone in the Rough and they can only recover with an 8 or 9 Iron. Drop them in a Deep Bunker and only a sand or pitching wedge gets them out. Hit them with a Lost Ball and they return to their last position and miss a turn. A Greenside Trap card can only be played against someone who’s reached the green but hasn’t putted yet — pure psychological warfare timed for maximum damage.
There are also 2 Holed Approach cards that let you hole out from off the green if played with the right Stroke card, and 2 Holed Putt cards that sink it from anywhere on the green. Those are the miracle shots — rare, dramatic, and exactly the kind of moment that makes a game memorable.
The Complexity
Let’s be honest: Pin High is not a quick-learn game. The instruction booklet runs deep — three full sections covering the basics, the cards, and the game rules, plus separate rules for Singles, Three Ball, Four Ball, Foursomes, and Skins. There’s a glossary of golf terms for non-golfers. Running sheets. Score sheets. Club distance charts.
This is a game designed by someone who loved the details of golf — the etiquette, the strategy, the rules. Fringe putts go first. Farthest from the cup putts next. Drivers can only be used from the tee. You can play past a hole and come back. It follows real golf protocol more closely than any other game in this series.
That depth is both its strength and its barrier. For golf nerds who want a simulation that respects the sport, Pin High delivers. For casual players looking for a quick game, the learning curve might be steep. It’s the chess of golf card games in a world full of checkers.
Ferny Creek: From the Bush to the Box
Ferny Creek is a suburb of Melbourne the way a hiking trail is a suburb of a highway — technically connected, spiritually a different world. It sits in the Dandenong Ranges, a region of wet forests, tree ferns, and mountain ash that tower 80 metres high. The community was devastated by deliberately lit bushfires in 1997 that destroyed 42 homes and killed three residents. The locals rebuilt. The community is still there.
Australia has a deep golf culture. Royal Melbourne, founded in 1891, is consistently ranked among the top courses in the world. The Australian Open dates back to 1904. Greg Norman dominated world golf through the 1980s and ’90s. A golf card game emerging from the bush outside Melbourne in 1996 isn’t random — it’s a product of a country that takes its golf seriously.
I can’t find much about Adrace Industries beyond Pin High itself. Another small company, another P.O. Box, another game that outlived its maker. The pattern holds.
Finding One Today
Pin High is rare outside Australia. It occasionally surfaces on Australian eBay or through specialty game sellers, but don’t expect to find it easily in the U.S. If you’re a collector and you come across one, grab it — it’s one of the most mechanically ambitious golf card games ever made, and the Australian provenance makes it a genuine outlier in any collection.
The Farthest Fairway
This series has now spanned a full century of golf card games and circled the globe — from a 29-cent game in 1950s Indiana to the Dandenong Ranges in 1996. Every game is different. Every creator had their own vision. But the impulse is always the same: take the thing you love about golf and put it in a deck of cards.
Pin High went deeper than most — building a full simulation with penalty attacks, club progressions, course data, and match-play scoring. Golf the Card Game takes the opposite approach — streamlined, fast, built for anyone to pick up in minutes. The Fore! Card, Wild Cards, and the Mulligan create strategy without the steep learning curve. Different philosophies, same passion.
If you know anything about Adrace Industries or the people behind Pin High, reach out. We’re building a global map of golf card game history, and there’s a pin in the Dandenong Ranges that needs a name behind it. Find us at playgtcg.com or on social media.
This post is part of our ongoing series exploring vintage golf card games throughout history. From American basements to the Australian bush, the love of golf at the table has never faded — on any continent.