Yu-Gi-Oh! Sets 2 Guinness World Records for Largest TCG Tournament, Most Entrants

April 30, 2024 at 12:00 pm | Posted in Konami, Other Stuff, Yu-Gi-Oh! | Leave a comment
Tags: ocg

Congratulations to Konami and the Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game, which set two Guinness World Records at the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series Japan Tokyo 2024 event this past weekend. The event celebrated the 10th YCS in Japan and, for the first time, was held over two days. It took place at Tokyo Big Sight, the largest convention center in the country.

YCSJ Tokyo 2024 challenged the Guinness World Records titles for “most entrants in a trading card game tournament” and for “largest trading card game tournament.” Admission to the event was by lottery only. Although the event could accommodate a maximum of 8,000 duelists, and although Konami announced multiple times that 8,000 really were participating, the Guinness adjudicator certified the official number of participants to be 7,443 for both records.

The first record, “most entrants in a trading card game tournament,” is for the largest number of people who played a TCG against each other in the same venue at the same time. This is a newly created record; it has no previous record holder.

At a ceremony during YCSJ Tokyo 2024 on April 28, Konami senior executive director Shoji Dewa (pictured up top) accepted the Guinness World Records certificate for this first record. Duelists who took part in the event received a commemorative token card with a description of this record and emblazoned with the Guinness World Records logo.

The second record, “largest trading card game tournament,” is for the largest number of people participating in one TCG tournament. This record was calculated after YCSJ Tokyo 2024 concluded. The previous record holder was another Yu-Gi-Oh! event — the 100th YCS in Long Beach, California, which took place on March 23–25, 2012, and involved 4,364 participants.

Shunsuke Kazama, the voice of Yugi Muto, congratulated the duelists at YCSJ Tokyo 2024 with a prerecorded message, stating that the records were achieved thanks to the cooperation of each and every duelist and the power of their bonds. Yutaro Takahashi, the winner of the tournament, said his victory was made possible because of his practicing with his friends that he made through Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is also the recipient of a third Guinness World Records title. In June 2011, Konami announced that Guinness certified Yu-Gi-Oh! as the “best-selling trading card game” with 25.1+ billion cards sold as of March 31, 2011.

(News from Konami PR [JP, EN]. Images from video by Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG Channel.)