Naruto TCG: Taipei’s Session Page Is Chinese Only

Two cities were still blank on the list. A few days ago they filled in. Kuala Lumpur and Taipei now have application windows for their NARUTO CARD GAME teaching sessions, which means the Asian leg of BANDAI CARD GAMES Fest 26-27 is fully booked out on paper.

Kuala Lumpur runs December 12 and 13, 2026 at IOI City Mall in Putrajaya. Applications open September 18 and close October 25, with lottery results from November 12. Taipei follows a week later, December 19 and 20, at the World Trade Center on Xinyi Road. Applications there run September 25 through November 3, results from November 19.

Earlier coverage: Naruto TCG: Three New Sessions, Hong Kong Opens Today (09/03/2026)

Both stops hand out the CP-001 Chakra Card to participants. Both also require a verified face photo in the BANDAI TCG+ app, and Bandai’s own note says verification can take a week or longer.

Seven Cities, One Process, Nothing to Buy

By now the roster reads like a band’s tour schedule: Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei. Seven stops with published session terms. All in Asia, all lottery-based, all handing out that same promo.

The rest of the tour looks a lot thinner. Shanghai sits in the calendar as „December 2026“ with no day attached to it. Tokyo is listed as „Early 2027“ with nothing attached at all. Orlando (January 7 to 10) and London (January 15 to 17) at least have dates on them, and still not one line about how you actually sign up.

Products? None. No boosters, no starters, no prices. The game arrives in summer 2027, and what Bandai is handing out until then is demo seats and a single promo card.

Taipei Does Not Exist in English

Now for the odd part. Pull up the English Fest overview, click Taipei, and you land on a path with zh-tw in it. The English path to the Taipei stop returns a 404. The full session terms (application window, lottery date, CP-001 note, face photo requirement) exist in Chinese only.

Kuala Lumpur has an English subpage. So do Singapore, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Taipei is the single stop where the English site drops visitors straight into the local language version. Is that a deliberate call for the Taiwanese market, or a gap in the rollout? Nobody says. My theory is gap, because the zh-tw page is structured exactly like the English templates, right down to the order of the info blocks.

Anyone living in Taipei will manage just fine. Anyone planning to travel in has to run the thing through a translator to work out an application deadline.

What This Means for Essen

Nothing immediate. None of these seven sessions is realistically reachable from Germany, and the lottery is aimed at local communities anyway.

The pattern behind it is what I keep staring at. Seven times the same scheme, always with the same lead time: application window open roughly five weeks, lottery about four weeks before the event, face photo verified in advance. For Essen (October 22 to 25), Paris Games Week (same days) and Lucca (October 28 to November 1), Bandai has announced tutorial sessions and said nothing about how to sign up. If the same TCG+ mechanic applies there, the Essen window is already overdue, because the show is less than seven weeks out.

That leaves two readings. Either the European tutorial sessions run without pre-registration and you queue at the booth the way it worked in Indianapolis. Or the announcement is still coming, in which case the photo verification gets genuinely tight, given Bandai’s own week-or-more estimate.

I am hoping for the first one, obviously. A lottery with a biometric prerequisite so you can try a card game you cannot buy yet? Honestly, that would be a wild amount of ceremony around a demo, even by Bandai standards. With One Piece the entry point was a game store, not an app.

So if you are heading to Essen in October and the NCG booth is on your list: do you actually have a TCG+ account yet? I ask because in six weeks that answer is either completely irrelevant or fairly important.

Sources

NARUTO CARD GAME Teaching Session Kuala Lumpur (BANDAI CARD GAMES Fest 26-27)
NARUTO CARD GAME Teaching Session Taipei (zh-tw)
BANDAI CARD GAMES Fest 26-27, all stops
NARUTO CARD GAME Official Website, News

Kenearos