Guide

How to Play the One Piece Card Game: A Beginner's Guide

25 September 2026 · about 7 min read

The One Piece Card Game is Bandai's official card game featuring the characters from One Piece. It may look complicated the first time, but the basic rules can be learned in ten minutes. Here is everything you need to play your first game.

What you need

One leader. The leader stays face up for the whole game. It determines the deck's colours and how many life cards you start with.
A deck of exactly 50 cards. At most 4 cards with the same card number, and only cards in the leader's colour or colours.
10 DON!! cards. They sit in a separate pile and are the game's energy.

The easiest way to start is with a starter deck (ST). It is a ready-made deck of 50 cards plus a leader that you can play with right away.

Setting up

Shuffle your deck and draw 5 cards. If you are unhappy with your hand, you may once put them back, shuffle and draw 5 new ones.
Place as many cards from the top of the deck face down as your leader has life (typically 4 or 5). These are your life cards.
The player who goes first does not draw a card on their first turn and gets only 1 DON!!. The second player gets 2 from the start.

A turn, step by step

Refresh: all your rested (sideways) cards are set upright again, and the DON!! attached to your characters returns.
Draw: draw 1 card.
DON!!: place 2 DON!! cards from the DON!! pile in front of you. You can have at most 10.
Main: this is where everything happens. You play cards by resting as many DON!! as the card costs. You can also attach DON!! to your leader or your characters. Each DON!! gives +1000 power for the rest of your turn. And you can attack.
End: your turn ends and it is your opponent's turn.

How to attack

You attack by resting your leader or one of your characters. You can attack the opponent's leader or one of their rested characters. A character normally cannot attack on the turn it is played, unless it has Rush.

The opponent can defend in two ways:

Blocker: a character with Blocker can be rested to take the attack instead.
Counter: cards in hand with a counter value (+1000 or +2000) can be discarded to give the defender more power. There are also counter events.

If the attacker has at least as much power as the defender, the attack succeeds. If you hit a character, it is knocked out. If you hit the leader, the opponent takes their top life card into their hand. If the card has a [Trigger], they may use the effect immediately. That can turn a game around.

How to win

The opponent has no life cards left, and you hit their leader one more time.
Or the opponent's deck runs out of cards.

The card types

Leader: The deck's main character, with life, power and an ability that the whole deck is built around.
Character: Figures you play out. You can have at most 5 on the table.
Event: One-off effects, e.g. knocking out a character, drawing cards or defending yourself.
Stage: A location that stays in play and gives an effect. You can have one at a time.
DON!!: The energy you pay with and boost power with.

Next steps

Once you know the rules, the most fun is building your own deck. See which decks are winning right now, and how many of their cards you already own. And if you want to know which cards are worth something, read the guide to rarities.