As the monster-battling card game freshens up with Speed Duel, and on the eve of a landmark World Championship in Europe this summer, we get a look inside its UK home

Words by Matt Jarvis

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20 YEARS (AND COUNTING) OF YU- GI-OH!

Yu-Gi-Oh! expansions have introduced a number of ways to summon formidable monsters – including the iconic Blue-Eyes White Dragon

Astone’s throw from Windsor Castle – all things considered, not the best building to be lobbing rocks at – among an inconspicuous row of terraced offces sits the UK home of Konami, the studio behind trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh!

Well, technically, ‘homes’; Konami is split across two neighbouring buildings. One houses gleaming glass-walled meeting rooms, along with a Metal Gear Solid Triumph motorcycle in its reception and shrines to Pro Evolution Soccer, the FIFA-rivalling football series developed by the company’s video games division, in its corridors. Next door, three floors up, lurks the more modest but no less important studio home to the team responsible for both Yu-Gi-Oh! and its free-to-play mobile app Duel Links.

For two decades, Konami has adapted Yu-Gi-Oh! from Shueisha, the Japanese publisher that first published Kazuki Takahashi’s manga series in 1996. An anime TV show followed, then the 1999 TCG based on the fictional Duel Monsters card game that plays a key role in Takahashi’s original story. (The card game offcially made its way into English in 2002.)

“I was in love with it from the very first moment I experienced it, let’s put it like that.”

Dom Galizia has been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! since almost the very beginning. Over the last 16 years he’s gone from being an avid player to a tournament organiser and judge to the owner of a card game shop before finally joining Konami, working on the game that has defined so much of his life.

“Every year when I go and see the World Championship final, I actually get emotional, because I see all these people here,” he says. “I’m working on a game [I love]; I love this game, and it’s such a privilege.”

While Galizia speaks passionately about his lifelong following of Yu-Gi-Oh!, he admits that the card game’s expansive card pool, built up over decades of sets and additions, can be intimidating for players trying to jump into the long-running TCG today.

“We as a company realised the game is quite complex, and the truth of it is that a younger person might find some dificulty in getting up to speed with the gameplay and the level of complexity of how cards interact with each other,” he says. “9,000 cards and how any given two cards might interact could be crazy, basically.

“Because it’s 20 years old it’s quite a subject to study in the end.”

It’s something that Speed Duel, this year’s simplified spin-off from the main Yu-Gi-Oh! ruleset, deliberately set out to alleviate. Based on the fast-playing matches shown in the anime TV series and later the Duel Links app (“There’s no hiding it, there’s no denying it,” Galizia says of Speed Duel and Duel Links’ close gameplay similarities), Speed Duel uses a separate pool of cards in a smaller playing area. At around 10 minutes, single battles play out in a fraction of the time of a standard Yu-Gi-Oh! match.