Flashback 2024: Characters for Charity // Goat Format Yu-Gi-Oh! Charity Event

When Kuhb Games and Erik Houdini turned Goat Format Yu-Gi-Oh! into a charity event. Creating 12 anime-inspired decks, the Millennium Card Rule, and $300 donated to build playgrounds.

Let’s take it back to the summer of 2024. Looking through the HOUDINI archives, this was the back in beginning, before I even knew what I was building.

Back then, HOUDINI wasn’t yet a magazine; it was an idea, a collective I was trying to form. I was focused on building connections, gathering links, and—most importantly—trying to do good work with those links. I wanted to find people doing interesting things and add value to their worlds.

If you’ve been following us for a while, or if you’re a deep reader of our content, you know HOUDINI has a strong, consistent connection to Goat Format Yu-Gi-Oh!.

To be honest, I’m not the best player. I’m actually not very good at all. But I love the game. I grew up playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, and after a brief period of unemployment in 2024, I was looking for a hobby to fill my time. I landed on Goat Format.

For the uninitiated, you can play for free on Duelingbook.com. Goat Format has a metagame, essentially the state of the game from around 2008 and earlier. It feels much more aligned with the original manga—it has a strong vibe that, in my opinion, gets lost in the modern iterations of the game. (Nothing against modern Yu-Gi-Oh!; I just don’t play it.)

A while after diving into the game, I linked up with a comrade, Kuhb Games. He’s probably the largest Goat Format content creator out there. We started talking, and the conversation quickly turned to a collaboration. We decided to host a tournament. But we didn't want it to be just another competitive event. We wanted to bend the rules of Goat Format a little, to make it more casual and experiment with a concept that’s as old as card games themselves: house rules.

Think about it: if you and I sat down to play Uno, we’d probably have to agree on which house rules we’re using first. It’s just part of the culture of tabletop games. So, we leaned into that idea and came up with "Characters for Charity."

charity flyer

What Was Characters for Charity?

The cool thing about Yu-Gi-Oh! is its connection to a manga and anime franchise full of distinct characters, each with their own signature decks, monsters, and styles. For the tournament, myself, Kuhb, and a few other friends of the Kuhb Games channel designed 12 pre-made decks based on specific characters.

Players would choose one of these 12 decks—like Yugi’s strategy, or Pegasus’s Toon deck—and duel it out. But the real magic was in the custom rule we created to simulate the feel of the original anime:

The Millennium Card Rule: Every deck was given three special 'Millennium' cards, mostly field spells. The player who chose to go second would get to play one of those field spells directly from their deck at the start of the game. We ended up releasing a more balanced list of these 'Millennium Cards' after the tournament, based on the testing done in the tournament. In the case of Trap Cards, those are also activated directly from the deck, but can also be Set directly from the deck and activated later. There are 26 cards selected to be Millennium Cards, 20 Spells, and 6 Traps. You can view them here!

In traditional Goat Format, going first is usually a no-brainer. But this rule gave players a real, strategic reason to choose going second. It added a fascinating layer of risk/reward.

If you were playing Mako Tsunami’s Water deck (an "Umi" deck), going second could be explosive. You’d draw your hand, and if you pulled a high-level monster, having Legendary Ocean on the field to reduce its level by one could put you at a massive advantage.
If you were playing Yugi, maybe you wanted to be reactive, flip your monsters face-up, and respond to your opponent’s plays. The 200 ATK boost from his field spell, Yami, is nice, but it’s not game-breaking. It might win you a few battles, but it doesn't warp the entire game state.

That dynamic was incredibly fun to play and even more fun to watch.

You can watch the full tournament stream on Kuhb Games' Youtube Channel:

Giving Back to the Playground

The tournament went really well. We raised approximately $300 for KABOOM!, a small charity focused on building playgrounds in underserved areas. It felt like the perfect fit. A lot of us grew up playing Yu-Gi-Oh! on the playground, and kids today are still doing the same. It was a great way to give back to that spirit. The Goat Format community is small—it’s nowhere near the size of the comparative retro competitive Pokémon scene, but the turnout was solid. What felt really special was that a lot of major competitive players and content creators came out to participate. It was a genuine community event.

For me, this tournament encapsulates what I was trying to do with the HOUDINI Collective in that very first moment. It was a collaboration between a then-just-getting-started project and a small, niche, and incredibly enjoyable community. It was about working with comrades (like Kuhb Games, who I’ve also done some graphic design work for) to build something fun that could also do a little good in the world.