Web3-powered open anime universe Azuki now has an official website up for its upcoming TCG, revealing how to play the blockchain game ahead of a July 5 tournament.

What Does Azuki TCG’s Quick Start Guide Reveal?

The quick start guide reveals all the important game mechanics you need to know to start playing Azuki TCG. Specifically, there is a gameplay summary, followed by explanations on specific mechanics such as the field, cards, victory conditions, combat phases, abilities, player turns, and effects, all laid out in a nicely-designed visual PDF that can be viewed entirely through the website’s dedicated guide section as images, so there's no need to download the file.

How Does the Core Gameplay Work?

This trading card game has players choose a unique faction that has its own distinct Leader to engage in 1v1 battles on a multi-layered field that allows players to place varied cards strategically in a front and back row while trying to win the game by bringing the health of the opposing side’s Leader to zero, or by forcing the opponent to run out of cards from their deck.

Players place cards on the Field, which is divided into the front row called the Garden, and the back row called the Alley. Each row can have up to 5 entities. The Garden is where cards can battle and thus sustain damage, and is where your Leader must always be, while the Alley is the back row in which fighting is not possible, nor can the opponent attack cards located in that row. This means you have to place cards safely in the back row before deciding to transport them through your Gate card in order to take them to the front row for battle, placing them in Cooldown to prevent using them in the same turn you portal them, although cards with the Charge keyword can attack in the same turn that they enter the Garden. Next to these two rows, you also have an IKZ pile and an IKZ area. The IKZ pile contains your IKZ cards, and you can draw from it once every turn to have an IKZ card placed face-up in the IKZ area. The IKZ area is where you can tap on placed IKZ cards to pay for card costs. Each card has a certain IKZ cost, and you need to use these IKZ cards to pay for those costs. Alongside all this is of course the discard pile and the standard deck area for your 50-card deck.

Some of the card types found in Azuki TCG

How Do Cards Work?

Each deck can consist of 6 different types of cards: the main character Leader, the Gate card that features unique portal abilities and affects your playstyle; regular Entity cards, Weapon cards for strengthening Entity and Leader cards; Spell cards for one-time effects, and IKZ cards which act as resource cards needed for paying card costs.

Whenever you want to play a card from your hand, you need to pay the IKZ cost, so if a card costs 5 IKZ, you need to tap 5 IKZ cards to pay that cost and play the desired card. Entity cards have a unique attribute called Gate power, and the higher the Gate power of your Entity card, the more effectively it can interact with the ability of the Gate card when you want to move your Entity card from the Alley to the Garden. As you can tell, the Gate card is an important piece of your deck that ultimately affects your playstyle and thus the kinds of cards you want to place in your deck. Each card can also differ by rarity, card number, and secondary card type. Every card may also have a certain Element displayed in the top right corner of the card. Cards can have an elemental type such as Earth, Water, Lightning, and Fire, with Neutral being the type that makes the card usable in any deck. Each card can also have special rules such as Abilities and Effects, with common ones labeled with special tags such as Charge, When Attacked, Defender for redirecting an opponent’s attack, and more.

Head over to the How to Play section of the game’s official website, linked in the X announcement down below, to learn more about this upcoming strategic card game. This guide is particularly useful for anyone who signed up for the Azuki TCG Tournament taking place July 5 in Los Angeles. For the rest of us, it’s a great insight into the kind of card gameplay we can expect ahead of the game’s launch that is planned to take place at some point later this year.

Earlier this year, Azuki TCG launched pre-orders for Alpha Starter Decks.