How To Play The One Piece Card Game
One Piece began as a manga that debuted in 1997 and has since exploded into one of the biggest Japanese pop culture franchises of all time. It’s spawned an incredibly popular anime, video games, and even a live action TV series on Netflix. In 2022, it was adapted into a trading card game, and a pretty fun one at that! We’re very happy to announce that Zephyr Epic is now selling One Piece Card Game products, and to get you going, here’s a brief overview on how to play.
The Set-Up
To start, every player has one Leader card, a fifty-card deck, a ten-card DON!! deck composed exclusively of DON!! cards, and Life cards, which are facedown cards taken from the playing deck (the number of which is determined by the Leader card).
Your goal? Defeat the other player’s Leader by eliminating their Life cards one by one until they’re out!
Five Phases
On your turn, you will go through five phases:
- Refresh Phase: Any cards that are rested (turned to the side) from your previous turn can now be turned upright, ready to be used again.
- Draw Phase: Draw 1 card from your playing deck and add it to your hand.
- DON!! Phase: Add 2 DON!! cards to your field.
- Main Phase: This is the meat of your turn, where you get to play cards from your hand and attack your opponent.
- End Phase: Resolve any cards with effects that need resolving. Then it’s your opponent’s turn.
Types of Cards
There are five general types of cards in the One Piece Card Game.
Leader cards are the primary character card for your deck. Each Leader card has an attacking power level, and the Life Counter lists how many Life cards you start the game with. The Leader card stays in the field until the game is over. Every Leader card has a designated colour, and the cards in your playing deck must match that colour.
Character cards are the Leader’s “crew” and feature many of the colourful characters from the One Piece series. Like Leader cards, they have an attacking power level. They also have a cost, which is how many DON!! cards you need to use to place the card in the field. Note that once a Character card is placed in the field, you cannot use it until your next turn. You also have a max of five characters in the field at once. Character cards may have special abilities that can be activated through use of the DON!! cards or triggers that are activated by actions taken in the game.
Event cards are one-time use cards you can play from your hand to affect the game. To use them, the card will have a displayed cost of the needed DON!! cards you’ll have to use.
Stage cards continuously affect the game once they’re played as long as they remain in the field. As with Character and Event cards, Stage cards have a printed cost for how many DON!! cards you’ll need to use in order to play them.
DON!! cards are the main resource of the game and one of the more unique aspects of One Piece, as they can be used in a multitude of ways.
DON!! Cards
On every turn, a player adds two DON!! cards to their field. This is an interesting deviance from most other TCGs, as it means that One Piece players are potentially ramping up at a similar speed.
DON!! cards can be used as a resource in a few different ways. The first is to “rest” a DON!! card in order to play a card from your hand. You can also attach a DON!! card to your Leader and Character cards in the field in order to boost their attacking power level.
Some cards have special abilities that can be activated through use of DON!! cards. DON!! X abilities require attaching DON!! cards to activate the effect, whereas DON!! -X abilities require the player to discard DON!! cards back into the DON!! Pile in order to activate their effects.
As DON!! decks are made up of ten cards, a maximum of ten DON!! cards can eventually be in play in the field.
Battling
Once you feel confident you have the right cards in place to battle, it’s time to attack! Depending on what cards your opponent has on their field, you’ll have to choose to attack their Leader card or a Character card they’ve placed. Battling Leader and Character cards is a similar process, but there are some important differences.
Let’s start with attacking an opponent’s Character. Choose which of your Leader or Character cards is making the attack and identify your opponent’s Character card that you’re attacking. Note that you can only attack a Character card that is rested (having been used on your opponent’s previous turn). If your card has the higher attacking power level, you win the battle and your opponent must discard their Character card. But if their attacking power level is higher, your attack fails. Either way, your attacking Leader/Character card is now rested and cannot be used until your next turn.
There are many ways to change your card’s attacking power level, including attaching a DON!! card, playing an Event card, or activating another Character card’s ability. But be careful, as your opponent may have options to increase their power level as well!
When attacking your opponent’s Leader card, it works the same as attacking a Character card except for the result. If your attack succeeds, instead of discarding the losing card, the Leader loses one Life card, which your opponent puts in their hand.
Once all of your opponent’s Life cards are gone, you need to land just one more successful attack on your opponent’s Leader card and you win the game!
Product Line
You can get One Piece cards in a standard array of products. Because the game has been out for a few years, there are now plenty of starter decks to choose from to get you going. And when you’ve got a few games under your belt and you’re ready to beef up your decks, you can move on to booster packs, which can be sold individually or as sealed booster boxes.
There are also now a few special releases to look out for. The game’s first subset, the Extra Booster Memorial Collection, was released just a few months ago and introduces new cards to support older archetypes that had fallen out of favour. Another special edition set, One Piece Card the Best, is due out in North America this upcoming November, and it will contain reprints of some of the game’s most popular cards, many of which feature new artwork.
In Conclusion
At Zephyr Epic, we are so excited that we are now carrying the One Piece Card Game. While it might seem like a pretty simple game at first glance, the different ways you can use DON!! cards provide plenty of diversity in how you build your game strategy. Easy enough to pick up quickly, with enough complexity below the surface to keep you playing for ages. The perfect balance for a new TCG!
Are you excited to give the One Piece Card Game a try? Let us know in the comments and, as always, thanks for reading!