Yu-Gi-Oh! and Digital Card Game Design Challenges

Yu-Gi-Oh! has been a juggernaut of the card game space since the late 1990s, birthing a massively successful TCG out of it’s incredibly popular manga and anime series. Following in the footsteps of Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! has been pumping out games since the late 90s in Japan and the early 00s in the rest of the world, totalling 56 Yu-Gi-Oh! game releases in the last 27 years. Being an older zoomer, I was the perfect age to get swept up in the Yu-Gi-Oh! craze, obsessively watching the TV show, collecting the cards and, of course, playing all the video games.

By the time of my fandom, the rules of the TCG were firmly in place and the video games had followed suit. The games of this era fell into two main categories: games that were largely pure battle simulators such as Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship Tournament 2004, that allowed you to duel characters from the show while slowly building up your card collection or games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction that were more narratively focused with deckbuilding fulfilling the role of progression. Both types of games however were at their core still the same game that could be played with the equivalent physical cards.

This transition from physical to digital was passable in the early 2000s but there was clear signs, even in this more simple form of Yu-Gi-Oh! that design decisions that were fine for the physical realm would hamper the digital experience. Namely, Yu-Gi-Oh! has a pretty free form system, called the Chain System, for activating cards in response to other game actions, called chaining. Most simply, this can be seen in trap cards, cards that would need to be placed on the field for one turn and then could be activated in response to certain conditions (your opponent attacking or summoning a monster for instance) or even activated on its own. In the physical game, players can simply interrupt their opponent and say “I am activating this card in response to yours” whenever they want to, as long as requirements are meant, and if they don’t want to, they do nothing. This is a very fun feeling system to spring your secret trap on your opponent. While in the physical realm your inaction is it’s own “no” response, in the digital space the game needs to manually check with the player if they wish to activate the card or risk player frustration should they miss their window to launch their counterplay. For cards with very specific activation requirements, this system works decently, though it can be a minor inconvenience.

However, allow me to introduce you to the card Reinforcements. Reinforcements on its own is a fairly inocuous card, on activation it simply raises your monster’s attack by 500 points for one turn, giving you a temporary boost to turn the tides of battle. This card is given to the player in their starting deck in many Yu-Gi-Oh! games from this era serving as a simple, but not overwhelmingly strong, introduction to the trap card mechanic. Reinforcements also has no prerequisite requirements to be activated. This means that once you have placed this card on your field, ready to spring your trap, you are constantly stopped in your play as with every single action you or your opponent takes the game checks if now is the moment you wish to get your 500 ATK points. I’m gonna take you through a hypothetical turn with Reinforcements on your field:

• Draw Phase: You draw a card (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)
• Standby Phase: I’m too lazy to explain the specifics of the Standby Phase (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)
• Main Phase 1: You normal summon a monster, the opponent activates a trap to destroy it (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)
• Main Phase 1: You play Monster Reborn to special summon that destroyed monster from your Graveyard (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)
• Battle Phase: You have 3 monsters that can attack, your opponent has 2 that are face down in defence position. Monster 1 attacks (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements) destroying their first monster.
• Battle Phase: Monster 2 attacks your opponents second monster (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements), your opponents monster has an effect that is triggered by the attack allowing it to also destroy your monster before it dies. (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)
• Battle Phase: Monster 3 attacks directly (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements), your opponent activates their own trap to negate your attack (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements).
• Main Phase 2: I’m gonna be nice and say nothing happens here

End Phase: You end your turn (The game asks if you wish to trigger Reinforcements)

As a child this annoyed me so much that in every Yu-Gi-Oh! game I have played, Reinforcements and cards like it are the first thing I remove from the starting deck, despite their broadly applicable utility.

Over the years, as the game has grown more complex with the addition of different summoning mechanics, the increasing presence of monsters themselves having powerful trap like abilities, and strategies that may involve summoning and sacrificing multiple monsters in a turn, the amount of things that can chain or be chained off of has exponentially increased. This has created the feeling of having a Reinforcements card on the field at all times. One particularly devilish addition to this problem is the rise of “Handtraps”, these are monsters that are designed not to be summoned but to be discarded from your hand in response to your opponents actions. One such example is Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring that can be discarded to negate any ability that summons a monster, destroys a monster or allows your opponent to draw a card. In digital games these cards trigger the chain system messages even if they just sit in your hand and have become pivotal to managing the powercreep of the modern game, making them much less avoidable than Reinforcements was in 2004.

This problem has been exacerbated even further by the push for competitive card game clients after the massive success of Hearthstone in 2014. In 2022, Konami finally released their own online competitive client for Yu-Gi-Oh! called Master Duel. This game is unfortunately one of the least fun experiences I’ve had playing a game. While up to this point, Yu-Gi-Oh! video games had largely been contained to single player experiences vs a CPU, this introduced a second player to the equation meaning not one but two people were now being bombarded with questions from the game about the chain system, similarly halting the game’s momentum only now half the time you have no control over the situation. Add into this smaller issues such as animations that are slightly too long and the time inherent to waiting for an opponent to find a card in their deck that has little feedback and it turns what can be a fairly fast paced and engaging, if overwhelming, experience into a slow and labourious one.

Unfortunately for Master Duel, many of it's annoyances are a necessary symptom of transforming a game not designed for the digital space into a digital game without being able to make appropriate adjustments. I do not envy having to try to compensate for these inherit UX issues. But what happens if you *do* try to change or design a card game to be video game friendly.

Solution 1 - The Simplified Mobile Game: A decently successful trend for these existing IPs has been to create versions of the game that shrink down the game board and reduce the starting health. In fact, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s first attempt at a digital client, Duel Links, does this. It reduces the Monster and Spell/Trap zones from 5 cards to 3, deck size limits are halved down to 20-30 card decks, starting Life Points are halved down to 4000 and Main Phase 2 was removed entirely. Furthermore, when the app first launched in 2017 it started with a base set much closer to the original card pool than the modern day. This was about as good of an approach as I think you can have to keeping the spirit of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG while limiting the friction inherent to it existing on digital platforms. Over time the app has slowly caught up to the modern version of Yu-Gi-Oh! and similarly this has enhanced the friction of the chain system. This approach was succesful enough overall that in 2024 Pokémon followed suit with the Pokémon Pocket TCG app which similarly shrunk down the Pokémon TCG format for a smoother digital experience.

Solution 2 - Remove Player Choices: What really becomes evident from analysing digital takes on Yu-Gi-Oh! however is that the best way to have a digital card game that feels good to play, is to design a card game that is intended to be played digitally. The only place to start with when discussing this category of games is Hearthstone, the game that popularised competitive digital card games. While Hearthstone is very visibly inspired in its design by Magic: The Gathering it takes very clear steps to both take advantage of the digital realm and eliminate the friction points that would be inate to directly porting MTG onto a computer.

Most notably, cards that allow you to summon something to the field will always summon something randomly, be a very specific thing or be one of 2 or 3 choices. As the game uses digital assets the player does not need a specific extra card to do this and it greatly reduces the downtime that would occur should they be allowed to search their entire deck. Furthermore, quick effects will just always trigger should the prerequisite be met, completely removing the Reinforcements issue. The choice to make destroying all opponents monsters a requirement for direct attacks is also a clear move to avoid the clunkiness that MTG’s block system has in a digital space. And this led to a multiplayer card game that felt incredibly smooth and natural to play on PC and later mobile.

Solution 3 - Make it a minigame in a 100+ hour RPG: Those were examples of how to design competitive PvP card games but what about the approach to a singleplayer one. Weirdly, the home of interesting PvE card games has been found in extremely high budget open world games like The Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Focusing on Queen’s Blood from FF7: Rebirth, my favourite in this genre of card games, the big thing to note is that each turn is just a single action with the player choosing which card to play in which location on the board, then similarly to Hearthstone’s removal of choice, the ripple effects of the played card happen automatically, as soon as its played. This keeps the flow of the game very snappy and the immediacy of CPU opponents removes any downtime that would be experienced should an opposing player partake in the often common long thinking times the player themselves engage in to map out their plan of attack. The use of a physical board you are looking to take control of turns Queen’s Blood into feeling more like a puzzle to solve than a competitive game.

Now that we’ve seen all the different permutations of the 1v1 card video game it’s time I reveal something I purposely omitted when recapping the history of Yu-Gi-Oh! video games. Alongside, the games described above, there was one more Yu-Gi-Oh! game I played as a kid that actually avoided the pitfalls I have described about Yu-Gi-Oh! video games.

If you’ve ever seen the first season of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV show you may remember that the card game they play, while it vaguely resembles the Yu-Gi-Oh! we know today, is very different to what Yu-Gi-Oh! would become, each person has just 2000 Life Points, there is no tribute summons or direct attacks and at one point Yugi DESTROYS THE MOON in order to get an advantage against his opponents fish based deck.

In this era, even the writer of the manga, Kazuki Takahashi, did not know the rules to the card game. This was due to the fact that Yu-Gi-Oh! initially was not meant to be a story about an ancient Egyptian pharaoh playing a children’s card game but instead about an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who played lots of different games (hence the ‘King of Games’ name/moniker) in a villain of the week type of scenario. It wasn’t until one plot line featuring the Duel Monsters game as that week’s game (this is the now famous pilot episode where Yugi summons Exodia to defeat Seto Kaiba) was recieved extremely well, that the story rapidly pivoted to be being solely about this card game. This meant that the first arc, Duelist Kingdom, had a rushed understanding of what Yu-Gi-Oh! as a card game should be, with little understanding of the implications his narrative choices may have on the soon to be developed real life card game.

At this time, however, Yu-Gi-Oh! was finding massive popularity in Japan and the desire to release all kinds of merchandise was ginourmous. This included starting development on the first Yu-Gi-Oh! video games, there was just one problem, how on earth do you make a compelling video game out of the mess being created in the manga’s early understanding of what the card game should be? In retrospect, this question actually freed the developers from some of the shackles that I’ve described in this article and would torment almost all future Yu-Gi-Oh! video games.

In December of 1999, Konami would release just the 4th ever Yu-Gi-Oh! video game, Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, just 6 months after the conclusion of the Duelist Kingdom arc in the manga. Although this game would feature a couple characters that entered the story after Duelist Kingdom, such as Ishizu Ishtar (called “Isis” in this game), its development overlapping so heavily with the Duelist Kingdom arc gave it incredible freedom to design a more video game friendly Yu-Gi-Oh! and the result would go on to become a speedrun darling and my personal favourite Yu-Gi-Oh! game of all time.

To be clear, Forbidden Memories is an incredibly flawed game. The game is brutally difficult, with one of the hardest end game bosh rushes in gaming, frustratingly opaque in explaining its systems due to an expectation players would just read the manual, has an incredibly disorienting overworld map, and an awful deckbuilding screen. But through the jank caused by what was no doubt a rushed development cycle, under the hood is a core system that was ahead of its time in terms of designing PvE 1v1 card games in a digital space.

Forbidden Memories, like Queen’s Blood would 25 years later, limits the player to placing just a single card on the board each turn, drastically speeding up the pace of individual turns. However, to not bring the pace of the overall game to a complete crawl the game had a fusion system where it would allow you to play up to 5 cards at once and attempt to fuse them together into more powerful monsters. This system, though impossible to really understand on your own without hours and hours of trial and error, accelerates the pace of the game drastically. Firstly, with good understanding of the fusion system’s quirks, for instance knowing that any woman + any rock monster will create the powerful ‘Mystical Sand’ card, you can quickly get powerful monsters onto the field without having any in your deck, taking advantage of the digital realm in the same way Hearthstone did. As the game would always fill your hand up to 5 at the start of each turn this would also allow dud fusions to serve as a way to search for your best cards. Over time this allows players to tailor make their deck to allow for the creation of specific fusion targets without necessarily having to grind too hard (although if you’ve seen a forbidden memories speedrun you will know this can still be a somewhat arduous process) for the extremely rare cards that are innately powerful.

The game has another thing that would later be seen in Hearthstone, automatically activating abilities. This takes a few forms, the traditional trap cards now activate the moment their prerequisite is met, completely sidestepping the Reinforcements issue. Furthermore, the game adds a Pokémon-esque type advantage system. When summoning a monster you can choose to give it one of two “Guardian Signs” that will increase or decrease your attack depending on the sign of the defending monster, adding a subtle extra layer of strategy should you come to understand the type chart (that the game itself never explains).

In so many ways Forbidden Memories is a bad video game, being poorly balanced and painfully reliant on the game’s manual (and in the modern era community resources) to explain across its system’s to the player. But despite this, with the freedom to imagine what Yu-Gi-Oh! as a video game could be, it was able to find solutions to problems with digital card games it took the industry 15, 20, 25 years to solve. I am incredibly blinded by nostalgia when I say this but Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories is an extremely special game.