Naruto TCG Debuts in Italy at Lucca in Late October

Lucca Comics & Games put out its Bandai plans, and the NARUTO CARD GAME made the list. This time it isn’t a bullet on a roadmap slide. It comes with an address: Piazza Santa Maria, inside the Gametrade pavilion.

The festival’s 60th edition runs October 28 through November 1, 2026. Organizers are calling the NCG’s appearance an anteprima assoluta italiana, an absolute Italian premiere, which means this is the first shot anybody in Italy gets at seeing Bandai’s ninja card game in the flesh. The official NCG site lists Lucca with the note “Tutorial sessions planned.”

A Whole Pavilion of Bandai Cardboard

Gametrade, Italy’s long-standing line to Bandai’s card games, is opening a pavilion at Piazza Santa Maria given over entirely to Bandai Trading Card Games. What’s inside: One Piece Card Game, Gundam Card Game, Dragon Ball Super Card Game Fusion World, Masters, and Digimon Card Game. Five products you can walk up to, buy, and play today.

And one you can’t buy until Summer 2027.

That placement tells me more than any trailer would. Dropping a brand-new TCG into the existing distributor corner instead of building it its own marketing cage is not how anybody plans a niche launch. Bandai is making the NCG show up where people already wander around with sleeves in their bag. Like a genin shoved in at the veterans‘ table with no warm-up round. Was that strategy or scheduling luck? Honestly, I can’t tell. It doesn’t look accidental though.

What Lucca actually offers in sessions, promos, or signup windows: nowhere to be found yet. At the Asian stops, that part only landed a few weeks in advance, sometimes with brutally short registration windows. If you’re planning the trip, keep the page bookmarked.

Europe’s October Is Getting Crowded

The calendar around Lucca is the part worth staring at. The official site puts SPIEL Essen and Paris Games Week in the exact same slot, October 22 to 25, both with tutorial sessions planned. Lucca opens three days later. Inside twelve days, Bandai runs the same product across three European conventions.

That’s a heavier European footprint than the late-July roadmap suggested, and way more than the Bandai Card Games Fest circuit offers, where Europe makes do with a single stop. There’s a catch, though. For Essen we know the hall and not a whole lot else. For Lucca we now know which games the NCG sits next to and who runs the booth. Italy is ahead on details right now.

Why should collectors somewhere else care? Because booth neighbors tell you which distributor puts a game on shelves later. In Italy that’s Gametrade. In Germany the path runs through Bandai’s distributor in Ratingen, and if Essen follows the same logic, the NCG won’t be standing alone in a corner there either. It’ll be parked between One Piece and Digimon.

The Community Is Already Sorting Itself Out

Over at r/NarutoCardGame you can feel that people are done waiting on announcements. An Italian user, u/Zenithaas, is asking which simulator is worth the time and where the player pool runs deepest. The thread is about the old Naruto card game, not Bandai’s new one. The reflex still says something: somebody wants to play Naruto and grabs whatever exists.

u/Darkannzz wants to know whether an official Discord exists yet. Answer so far: no. For a game roughly eleven months out from release that’s perfectly normal, and for the impatience simmering in that subreddit it’s telling.

My expectations for October stay modest. Bandai promised reveals for New York Comic Con (October 8 to 11), so the European dates after that are likely demo tour rather than news factory. The next real information wave is one Bandai dated itself: December 2026, followed by in-store tutorial sessions starting January 2027.

So here’s what I keep wondering. Is anyone actually making the trip to Lucca, or are you holding out for the store rounds in January? Drop it in the comments, I’m genuinely curious how far people will travel for a game they can’t buy yet.

Sources

Lucca Comics & Games 2026: Bandai Card Games
NARUTO CARD GAME Official Website
AnimeClick: Naruto Card Game, regole e prime carte
r/NarutoCardGame

Kenearos