This Yu-Gi-Oh! AR Game Looks Too Good To Be True

Shut up and take my money.

A YouTuber and Yu-Gi-Oh! superfan going by the name of SuperZouloux has developed an augmented reality (AR) game that brings the hit Japanese card game to life in the real world. The system is composed of an electronic card mat, a custom camera system, and 3,600 NFC-enabled Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

For those unfamiliar, Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Japanese manga turned anime centered around a fictional card game in which players battle one another using powerful monsters, spells, and traps. Some of the games are played using Duel Disks, specialized Dueling equipment that uses a portable hologram projector to display Duel Monsters cards in the real world.

In a video posted on YouTube, SuperZouloux walks us through his own version of the AR system. Whenever SuperZouloux places a card on the mat, the corresponding monster appears in the real world as an animated 3D model. As if that weren’t cool enough, every time SuperZouloux places a card on the mat, the camera angle changes automatically for a better view of the action.

“I’m pretty happy about that,” says SuperZouloux in the video, “because it will allow me to have a dynamic stream by offering 3D in addition of having changes of camera, while allowing you to follow the invocations as well as possible.

First reported by Kotaku, the project required that SuperZouloux learn how to develop in Unreal Engine 5 pretty much from the ground up. Ultimately, the project, in its current state, took seven months to develop. You can watch SuperZouloux test the live 3D system on Twitch.

For more information check out the full breakdown here. The video is in French but includes English subtitles, so you should have no trouble following along. If any Konami executives are reading this, please do yourselves and the world a favor by giving this man a job and expanding upon this revolutionary system.

Image Credit: SuperZouloux