Naruto TCG: One Piece’s Rules Studio Is On Board

Sometimes the most interesting NCG news of the week doesn’t come from Bandai at all. This week it was hiding on the portfolio page of a small Tokyo studio. No press release. No date. Nothing.

The company is called Next Play Inc. (株式会社Next Play), and its works page now lists the NARUTO CARD GAME with three lines underneath: game rule development, card list creation, operations support. In the original Japanese, „ゲームルール開発 / カードリスト作成 / 運営サポート“. Credit goes to the folks at NARUTORECA, who track pretty much every twitch this game makes in their timeline. They spotted it on October 1.

Earlier coverage: Naruto TCG: No Counter Here Is Free (Sept. 27, 2026)

So who is Next Play?

A young outfit. Founded April 15, 2022, sitting in the Ueno TA Building in Tokyo, and their mission statement boils down to „creating the next generation of play.“ The services page sells them as the crew that handles whatever a trading card game needs to keep running: building rule systems, designing and tuning card effects, supporting live operations. They’re hiring at the moment, by the way, TCG developers and test players included (so if you read Japanese and want a fun job, there you go).

Where it gets good is the rest of that list. The ONE PIECE CARD GAME is on it. Cookie Run: Braverse, Kaiun Colosseum (開運コロシアム), a JURASSIC PARK TCG and the DRIVE CARD GAME are on it too. Every one of those six card games carries the exact same three-line credit as Naruto. The board games further down the page? Different wording.

Small detail worth noticing: Cookie Run isn’t a Bandai game. Next Play works for several publishers, which makes them an outside design shop rather than somebody’s in-house team.

What this means for the game

Honestly, a lot of things just clicked for me. When the first cards showed up in July, I had that One Piece feeling immediately (a leader as your fixed starting card, a clean resource track, counters tied to timing windows). My assumption back then was that Bandai had simply recycled its own winning formula. Now it looks more like at least some of the same people have their hands in both rulebooks.

Good news or bad news? Depends who you ask.

As a player, I see plenty to like. The One Piece Card Game has built a solid scene, and Luffy on the box is far from the only reason why. You can teach the rules in minutes and games stay short. And whenever a deck got out of hand, Bandai stepped in with ban lists and errata. That third credit, operations support, shows up for Naruto as well. I read that as years of card maintenance, not a rulebook that gets handed off and forgotten in a drawer.

Play Magic long enough and you know the other side of this coin. A studio with six games in its portfolio grows a house style whether it wants to or not, and if the NCG’s skeleton sits too close to One Piece, you end up with a second copy of a game half your local store already owns. Then again, our look at the known counter cards showed Naruto doing its own thing. Kakashi costs you two life. Shisui locks your chakra recovery. Free counters don’t exist. So how much of that came from Bandai’s own team, and how much from Next Play? The list doesn’t say.

What we still don’t know

Plenty. There’s no date on the works page, so we have no idea when the entry went up or how long Next Play has been on the NCG, and nobody has explained how the work is split with Bandai. Bandai hasn’t named the studio in any official announcement; the only source so far is the entry on nextplay.co.jp. If someone tells you „the One Piece team built the Naruto game,“ they’re reaching. On paper it’s the same company with the same three jobs, and that’s all we’ve got.

I still think it’s a good sign for players in Europe. If the same studio runs ongoing support, the odds are decent that the NCG’s organized play follows the One Piece pattern of store tournaments, regular ban lists, and errata that actually show up. You’ll probably get to see more of the card list on October 10 at the panel at New York Comic Con. Until then I’m sticking to one rule. Cards first, verdict second.

So what’s your take? Does it reassure you that people with One Piece experience are on this, or are you worried there’s too much straw hat under the forehead protector?

Sources

Next Play Inc.: works page (nextplay.co.jp)
NARUTORECA: Timeline, entry from Oct. 1, 2026
NARUTO CARD GAME: New York Comic Con 2026 Event Information

Kenearos