I picked up something new the other day - a lot of three unopened packs of Calbee cards from the 1980s. I've seen auctions for these come up from time to time and had always wanted to get one (or three).
Its easy to tell that the packs are from the 1980s owing to the size of the cards - all Calbee cards from 1981 to 1989 were mini card sized. Somewhat confusingly some series from both the 1980 and 1990 sets, but not all of them, were also the same size. So if you get a pack of mini cards you know its from no earlier than 1980 and no later than 1990.
But what specific year in that range do you have if you get one? That is a bit harder to determine, since the packs themselves do not state a year (except in 1989). The easiest way of course is to just open them up and have a look, but then you won't have an unopened pack anymore.
I did a bit of looking around and discovered that a Japanese blog called the "Calbee Card Research Centre", which is great for really detailed info on some Calbee cards, recently did a series of posts on the subject of identifying 1980s Calbee packs.
To simplify what is written there over the course of several posts, Calbee changed the color of the packs each year and also varied the design slightly. By color it breaks down like this (click on the link for each year to see his post with pictures of what the design of each looks like. Years without a link are ones which I included based on Dave's comment on this post).
Green packs: 1984, 1985 and 1987
Blue Packs: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1986 , 1989, and 1990
Red Packs: 1983
This isn't quite a full list since they don't have posts about the 1981, 1984, 1988 or 1990 packs (whcih I've included above based on Dave's comment below) but its a pretty useful resource so far despite that. For some years there is a bit of variation in the design (but not the color) of the packs from series to series and the posts contain information about that too.
Looking through those, I was able to determine that the three packs I bought were from 1985, which is pretty cool . I'm very tempted to open them, but I'm going to try to resist that temptation and keep them as they are since they are one of those things where the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.
