The Dragon Ball arcade card game — decks, God Rares, rank tiers and the road to the championship.
Dragon Ball Super Divers is an arcade trading card battle game developed by Bird Studio and published by Bandai, running on dedicated cabinets across Japan since November 7, 2024. You scan your physical cards onto the machine, arrange them into three areas, and fight with a mechanic built on initiative, ki, and timed strike battles — a real-time touchscreen battle that mixes deck-building with rhythm timing. Each play costs 100 yen, and your data lives on a Diver Passport, an amusement IC card that carries your deck, avatar and rank between machines. Twelve card sets have now shipped, from the launch roster through Innate Attack in September 2026, with the 13th set in progress and a 2nd Anniversary Set due for release in 2027.
Every round is a sequence of timed touchscreen strike battles fought in three areas at once. Combat power decides who takes the initiative, ki decides who can still act, and one mistimed press can cost you the turn.
A deck is up to seven Battle Cards plus one Avatar Card. With 80 cards in the current set alone and rarities from Normal to Secret, what you scan and what you arrange is the actual game.
Impact, Boost, Rush and the other combat types decide how a card behaves in its area — and putting all three main types in one area triggers the Triple Type Bonus, the biggest damage swing in the game.
Five rank tiers from Bronze to God, five ranks each, with upset bonuses for beating opponents above you and a season reset each cycle. The top 100 God-rank players are published on the official site.
Dragon Ball Super Divers is an arcade trading card battle game developed by Bird Studio and published by Bandai, running on dedicated cabinets in Japanese arcades since November 7, 2024. It is not a digital card game. It is a physical product: you buy sealed booster packs of printed cards, scan them onto the machine, and play with the cards you own.
The game sits at an unusual intersection. Mechanically it is a real-time arcade battler — closer to a rhythm-action game than to a turn-based card game — because the resolution of every exchange is a timed button-press strike battle played across three areas of the touchscreen simultaneously. Strategically it is a deck-building game, because the cards you bring and how you arrange them determine whether the timing even matters.
Getting into it is straightforward if you are in Japan. A play costs 100 yen, and your progress is stored on the Diver Passport, an amusement IC card that carries your deck, your avatar, your training data and your rank between machines. New players can start with a Trial Diver Passport, free of charge from the machine, which can be handed over or transferred to a full Diver Passport later — a generous onboarding path for a game that expects you to invest in physical product.
What makes it worth the ongoing spend is the design of the card pool. Each set adds new God Rare cards with bespoke art and effects, and the official release schedule has settled into a roughly two-month cadence — twelve sets from launch in November 2024 through Innate Attack in September 2026, with the thirteenth on the way. The result is a live-meta card game where the difference between a good deck and a great one is usually one specific new God Rare.
The core numbers, in one place.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Developer | BIRD STUDIO |
| Publisher | BANDAI |
| IP | Dragon Ball — BIRD STUDIO / SHUEISHA / TOEI ANIMATION |
| Platform | Japan arcade cabinets |
| Launch | November 7, 2024 |
| Price per play | 100 yen |
| Data card | Diver Passport (amusement IC card); Trial Diver Passport is free |
| Trial Passport limit | Up to 30 uses, issued on top of the machine |
| Battle deck | Max 7 Battle Cards + 1 Avatar Card = 8 slots |
| Battle areas | 3 per side — attack, support and (from round 2) BUPPA |
| Cards per area | Up to 3 |
| Combat types | Impact (I), Boost (B), Rush (R) and more; Limited (L) is one copy per deck |
| Triple Type Bonus | Damage multiplier when one area holds I + B + R |
| Ki ball maximum | 4, raised to 5 by the Buchigire system in the 13th set |
| Rarity tiers | GDR, SR, R, N, PUR, SEC, EXR |
| Current set | 12th set "Innate Attack" — released September 17, 2026 |
| Current set size | 80 unique cards (N 30, R 18, SR 12, GDR 8, PUR 10, SEC 2) |
| Rank tiers | Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, God — five ranks each |
| Rank match window | Daily 10:00–23:59 JST |
| Team size | Up to 4 players |
Two rows explain the shape of the game. The seven-plus-one deck limit is what forces the deckbuilding decisions to matter — you cannot bring your whole collection, so every slot is a commitment. And the two-month set cadence is what keeps it alive: a new set means a new God Rare, a shifted meta, and a reason to go back to the arcade.
The other thing to know is what the machine actually does with your cards, because a lot of confusion in the wider fandom comes from mixing this game up with other Dragon Ball card games. Super Divers cards are scanned in individually, arranged on a touchscreen, and resolved by the machine. Nothing is played on a phone, and there is no online client — the entire competitive scene lives in physical arcades.
As of November 2026 the game is two full years into its life and shows no sign of slowing down.
The cadence of releases is the headline: sets every two months, championship play every year, anniversary sets every two years. For a card game that launched in arcades rather than on a platform, that is a genuinely ambitious program, and it is the reason the competitive scene is still growing rather than consolidating.