Zenonzard

» see aicarddass.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Bandai's card division announced a brand before it announced a game. AI CARDDASS arrived in September 2018 as a label for digital card games built around machine learning, and Zenonzard was the first title under it. The app reached phones on 10 September 2019, free, with a release broadcast the same evening.

The AI came from HEROZ, a Japanese company whose reputation was built on shogi engines strong enough to beat professionals. What it supplied here was not a difficulty slider. Every player got a buddy AI, a codeman, which watched how you played and kept adjusting to it. The thing sat beside you rather than only across from you: it would suggest a line when you stalled, and it would replay a lost game from the turn where it thought you had thrown it.

Under the AI was a real card game. Force, chosen at the start, changed how the same deck behaved, and Flash Timing let you act inside the opponent's turn. The mana system moved up and down instead of only climbing, which meant a board could be rebuilt rather than merely survived.

Zenonzard never ran in English. That matters more here than it usually does, because the product being sold was a tutor: a machine that explained its reasoning and talked you through a losing board, all of it in Japanese. Cards themselves travel on iconography and numbers, but a running commentary does not travel at all.

~ the case file ~

~ the machine across the table ~

In 2019 an AI badge on a consumer product was usually a word rather than a model. This one was a model, and Bandai put it where the customer could feel it. You could fight your codeman or fight alongside it, and either way it kept forming opinions about the deck you had brought.

The feature list reads oddly modern now and read oddly then. There was advice on the next move, and there was graph analysis of a finished game with a replay function that let you restart from the turn the system flagged as the hinge. Most of that is ordinary in 2026 and none of it was ordinary on a phone in 2019.

~ the last battle ~

The ending was announced on 18 December 2020, two months out, with no cause attached. Paid Z Stones stopped selling on 18 January. On 15 February the game ran a twenty-four hour event open to everyone, a final run at the strongest AI, which is as good a last rite as a product like this could ask for.

~ the refund desk ~

The service stopped at 10:59 on 18 February 2021. The window to claim money back on unused paid stones opened at 11:00 that morning and ran to 10:59 on 19 May, three months to the minute. Somebody set that window deliberately, at both ends.

The official site is still up five years later. It still carries the character art and the producer letters, under one line saying the service for this app has ended. The game it describes cannot be played by anyone, and the page has not stopped describing it.

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