This past weekend at New York Comic Con, I was able to get hands on a new Yu-Gi-Oh! card game called Duel Links. Growing up, I did collect Yu-Gi-Oh! cards but I didn’t do any dueling so I was excited to play this game, and possibly relive my childhood through it.
To start off, the game is pretty straight forward. The rules and cards that you remember from the physical card game are now built into the app. For someone who knows the rules, when you play this game, you will be ready to go from the start. Since I never dueled anyone, the rules were kind of confusing for me, but I’m sure players would get the hang of it after they play a few matches.
To start off, your deck will have 20-30 cards. Your starting hand will have 4 cards and you will pick up a card each time you put one down into the playing field. Your LP or health starts at 4000 and will work its way down depending on how hard your enemies attacks are.
Each duel will last approximately 3-5 minutes which is a great amount of time for a quick card game whether you are on your break at work or in between matches in another game.
At the end of the match, there will be a log that you can view that details the entire match including what moves you and your opponent made. If your opponent played a card that you really liked, you will be able to see that card in the log so you can try to find it afterwards.
The mobile game is free to play but will have microtransactions. Those microtransactions include the ability to buy card packs — individually or in groups. When you buy multiple card packs, you will receive gems that you can later use to purchase more cards. There will also be card boxes available so for whatever character you choose to be, each one can have their own deck which is assigned to them.
The animations in the game looked great. The game was fast paced and was a lot of fun. Even though I wasn’t into the dueling part of Yu-Gi-Oh!, I will be downloading this game once it is released this holiday.
