Getting started in Nanikado

The core loop

You roam the world, defeat emoji monsters and capture their essence as cards. Cards are your skills: melee, ranged, magic, shields and healing. Level them up by fighting and grow your collection.

In town the Cardmaster lets you fuse cards: merge two or more identical cards into a single stronger one. Their experience and history flow together, and with a little luck the result ascends to a rare card. A fusion costs coins equal to the combined levels of the cards you feed in.

Two more card-smiths stand beside him: the Junior Cardmaster turns 5 mini cards of the same species into one normal card, and the Wise Cardmaster forges 5 maxed (level-100) normal cards into a single boss card — with a small chance it comes out rare.

A fusion rolls for a rare card at 1 % per merge step — two cards make one roll, five cards make four, and one hit is enough. That is what the 🧫 fusion catalyst is for (5,000 🪙 at the item shop): tick “with catalyst” in the fusion dialog and that one fusion rolls at 8 % instead. The tick starts off every time you open the dialog, so there is nothing to prime and nothing to forget — but the catalyst is spent by the fusion either way, whether a roll hits or not.

Using AUTO slots

Every card in your deck has an AUTO switch. Long-press a card (or hold its number key) to toggle it — a small companion bot then casts that card for you automatically. You can arm up to 3 AUTO cards at once; the big nuke stays in your own hands.

Important: with no AUTO cards armed, your bot only has the basic stone throw to fall back on — so it just throws stones. Fill your AUTO slots with real skills — an attack, a shield, a heal — and the bot actually fights well. A master switch above the card bar pauses all AUTO at once, handy the moment a boss appears.

The bot walks up to your locked target, keeps ranged and magic cards at a distance, renews your own shields and buffs, and heals when your health runs low — and the server checks every cast, so it is never a cheat.

Bot time & diamonds

The companion bot runs on bot time. You buy it as a package from the town merchant and swallow it to load hours onto your account. Packages hold 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours. There are two kinds: the autobot grinds experience for you, and the superbot also collects the loot. Start and stop it via the 🤖 / ⚡ timer at the top of your badge.

Diamonds 💎 are a rare second currency, quite separate from coins. Normal monsters drop them only very occasionally; bosses hand out far more. They land straight in your account, shared among everyone who helped in the fight. Bosses also sometimes drop a little bot-time package as a bonus.

Ferries & 48 continents

The world is an archipelago of 48 continents. You start in the central town and travel outward. The further from the center you go, the tougher the monsters — the map is your difficulty curve, so push onward only once you are strong enough.

To cross open water, take a ferry: walk up to the pier in a harbor town and pick a connected destination from the world map. Your personal map fills in as you explore. Getting somewhere fast is possible, but never free: a warp stone puts you down in any chunk you have already visited, and the travel agency sells a ride to a neighboring town — both further down under the quick button & teleporting. Travelling still costs something, so the world stays big.

Towns

Towns are safe — no monsters — and full of helpful faces:

• Inn / Innkeeper — bind your safepoint here, and respec your attributes (redistribute all your stat points; it costs coins that scale with your level).
• Item shop — buy potions and useful items, sell the materials you gather, and pick up bot time.
• Card shop & market — fuse cards at the Cardmaster, and use the player market: list your own cards for coins or buy someone else's.
• Clothes shop — change your character's appearance.
• Guild hall — found your own guild.

The town you bind at becomes your safepoint; until then it is the central town at (0,0).

The player market

Every town has its own player market — a ring of 20 stalls at the edge of the plaza, marked by a 🛒 sign. Prices differ from town to town, so comparing them as you travel can pay off.

Tap the 🛒 sign to offer one of your own cards (anything not currently sitting in your deck): pick it, then set a price and how many days to list it for. Stall rent is 10 coins per day, paid upfront — 10 days costs 100 coins — and is not refunded if you sell early or take the card back.

Tap an occupied stall to see the card's history and, via the ℹ️ toggle, a plain-text readout of its skill — then buy it outright. The proceeds go straight to the seller, even while they are offline.

House & furniture

Empty houses in town can be bought from the realtor waiting inside. Once it is yours, the same character becomes your butler and sells you furniture: display cases, armchairs, rugs, plants — and a bed. Tap the bed to set your safepoint right there at home.

Display cases show off your cards for every visitor to admire, complete with each card's history, and you can take a card back out at any time. Furniture other than rugs may fill up to 20 % of the floor, so choose what you put on show.

Party & guilds

Team up into a party of up to four. Fighting the same monsters shares the experience, and you see each other's health bars. Invite from the party panel, or in a town type /party-invite <name> in chat with a fellow player nearby.

Guilds are a lasting banner. Found one at the guild warden in town for 5,000 coins — you pick a name, a cloak color and an emblem, and every member wears your cloak. Invite others in a town with /guild-invite <name>.

Want a word in private? Type /pm <name> <message> in chat to whisper any player anywhere in the world, and /r <message> to reply to the last person who whispered you. Private messages show up in violet; the channel picker on the left of the input also has a ✉ PM channel where you type a name once and keep whispering.

Death & the escape stone

When your health hits zero, you fall. There is no instant retry: you respawn at your safepoint — your bound town, or the central town — with half your health, and make your way back. It should never pay off to die on purpose.

To skip the long walk home, carry an escape stone: using it whisks you straight to your safepoint with no health loss, and it works even mid-fight to flee a losing battle — it is the only stone that does. The other stones are under the quick button & teleporting, and a ⛑️ revive (5,000 🪙) lets a fellow player put you back on your feet on the spot instead, with half your health.

Helpful items & timed effects

The item shop carries the same shelf in every town — only the medium and large potions wait for the outer continents, everything else is on display from your very first day and the price is the gate. Next to the potions you will find an 💊 antidote (150 🪙, clears poison instantly and works mid-fight), a ⛑️ revive (5,000 🪙, puts a fallen fellow player beside you back on their feet with half their health) and a 📯 party horn (2,000 🪙, calls every online party member to you — each of them has to accept).

An 💊 antidote is not spent if you are not poisoned. Any living player can use a ⛑️ revive on a nearby fallen player — no party required — and they stand up where they fell. A 📯 party horn works only outdoors; a member who accepts while fighting stays put, and the call is spent.

Five things on that shelf do not go off at once: they run for a while, so what you are really buying is time. Buying again restarts the clock instead of adding to it — top up when an effect is nearly out, not when it is half full.

• 🏮 Lantern — 250 🪙, 10 minutes. Widens your circle of light underground from 4.5 to 9 tiles. The 🕳️ holes out in the world lead down into dark dungeons of two to four floors, and that is the only place a lantern does anything — try to light one up top and the game refuses instead of burning it.
• 🧺 Gathering basket — 500 🪙, 10 minutes. Materials are pulled in from 2.5 tiles instead of 1. Walking past is enough; you stop having to step on every single drop.
• 🧭 Compass — 1,000 🪙, 5 minutes. Marks the boss with a 👑 and every rare monster with a blinking red dot, on the minimap and on the world map. It reads the chunk you are standing in, not the neighborhood.
• 🏕️ Campfire — 400 🪙, 5 minutes. Regenerates health and skill points as fast as sitting down, about ten times the standing-around rate (a point of health every 1.2 seconds instead of every 12) — without you having to sit. It only works at the fire, within 2.5 tiles: walk off and the bonus pauses while the fire burns on. You cannot light one while something is hitting you.
• 🐴 Mount — 1,500 🪙, 20 minutes. Rented from the same merchant, not an item you carry: +25 % walking speed outside of combat. In a fight and in the water you are as quick as everyone else, and everybody can see you are mounted. Rent again whenever you like.

Whatever is running shows up as a small chip under your health bars, top left: the emoji, a clock face that empties as the time runs down, and the remaining time in the corner (“10m”, “59s”). A chip goes red in exactly one situation — you have wandered too far from your own campfire, so the clock is running but nothing is healing.

The quick button & teleporting

Rummaging through the bag mid-fight costs you the fight. That is what the 🎒 quick button is for: it sits along the bottom edge beside your card row, just left of the 🪑 sit button. Hold it for half a second and a list of everything usable in your bag opens — pick one and it stays on the button. A short tap uses it, the little number in the corner is your stock, and the same list ends with “✕ empty the button”.

Twelve things may sit there: all three potions, compass, lantern, campfire, gathering basket, antidote, revive, party horn, escape stone and teleport stone. Deliberately not the 🌀 warp stone (it needs a destination off the world map), not the bot-time packages (an 8-hour package on a hair trigger would be an expensive slip, so those take two taps in the panel) and not the 🧫 catalyst (that one is a tick box at the Cardmaster).

Three stones shorten the road, all from the item shop. The 💫 teleport stone (40 🪙) drops you somewhere else in the chunk you are already in. The 🪬 escape stone (120 🪙) takes you home to your safepoint without losing health. The 🌀 warp stone (400 🪙) is the long-distance one: using it opens the world map, and a tap on a chunk you have visited before sets you down there on a random free spot. You can start from the map as well — tap any chunk and its info popup has a teleport button, greyed out if you carry no warp stone or have never been there. All three are used up, and only the escape stone works while you are fighting.

The 🧭 travel agency on the town plaza needs no item at all: walk up to the agent, pay 1,000 🪙 and pick from up to eight neighboring towns — your own continent plus everything exactly one ferry hop away. It is the one shortcut into a town you have never seen, which is why it costs more than a warp stone. One hop is usually about one difficulty tier, so it is the fast way to monsters that fit your level — and the fast way to die.

The boss arena

On the plaza of the central town, off to the west, stands the 🏟️ arena crier. Tap her and you can go down into the arena — that part is free for everyone, always. The room below is split in two: the ring in the middle, walled off with a single gate, and the stands all around it.

By the gate waits the arena master, and he takes your order: one boss, at whatever level you dare. The cap is your own level + 20 (never above 100), and the price is 50 🪙 per boss level and per fighter — a level-30 boss on your own is 1,500 🪙, a level-80 boss 4,000 🪙, the level-100 boss 5,000 🪙. He offers your own level, +5, +10 and your cap as quick picks, and ordering asks for a second tap: a defeat does not give the coins back.

In a party, everyone standing in the room is asked first — a banner with 30 seconds to answer “fight along” or “stay in the stands”. Only those who accept walk into the ring, and only they count towards the price, which the person who ordered pays for all of them.

The gate lets nobody but the fighters through, and the fight stays inside it: from the stands you cannot land a hit on the boss, and it cannot reach you. The boss brings two to five helpers, five levels below itself. There is exactly one ring on the whole server — if it is busy, you are a spectator. It frees up after 10 minutes at the latest, or 20 seconds after the last fighter has left it.

Win, and you keep the full experience, helpers included — and nothing else at all. No cards, no coins, no 💎, no bot time, and the kill counts for no ranking and no species list: bought is not earned. What you do get is a line in the world chat naming you and the level. Lose, give up or run out of time, and the coins are simply gone. The fight is the product.

The living city

A town is not empty. Between 40 and 120 people live in each one — roughly as many as it has front doors — a dozen of them are out walking at any moment, and up to 25 are on screen at once. They stand about, stroll a few tiles and back, turn their heads when you come within three tiles, and every so often blow a 👋, 👍 or 🙏 bubble. Tap one and you get a bubble back. Everyone sees the same person standing in the same spot: the crowd is worked out from the town itself, not sent over the network.

None of them is a player, and there is one reliable way to tell: players carry deck spheres — that small ring of card emojis circling slowly around the figure. The townsfolk have none, no name plate and no health bar. Shopkeepers and the other useful faces do have name plates, so read the spheres rather than the name: a figure with cards circling it is somebody playing right now. You cannot fight the population, trade with them or shove them aside — they are the town breathing.

One musician plays on every plaza — 🎻, 🎺, 🪕 or 🎸, with 🎵 drifting up. Tap them and a jukebox opens with all 27 pieces of music in the game: pick one and it plays through once, then the normal music of the place returns. That is for your ears only and only while you are here; nothing is saved. And a 🐈 or 🐕 is doing the rounds somewhere — tap it for a ❤️.

Dungeons

A 🕳️ entrance in the wilderness leads into a dark, branching dungeon. Follow ⬇️ to descend and ⬆️ to climb again; the upward stair on the first level is your way back to the surface. A lantern helps only down here.

Dungeon levels draw their monsters from a family. The entrance level is a cave, while deeper levels take their family from the continent, so the look and the enemies can change as you descend. Ordinary rooms and corridors hold aggressive monsters; dead ends are worth checking.

The deepest level has a boss chamber. Treasure chambers hold a large chest behind guardians, so clear its guards before trying the chest. Smaller chests can also wait in dead ends. After the dungeon boss falls, its dungeon treasure cycle eventually opens again — it is an expedition you can return to, not a permanently emptied place.

Finds & recovery

Gatherable things on the ground are materials: walk over them to put them in your bag, keep them as finds, or sell them at the item shop. Some ground finds conceal a chest; opening one can add coins and sometimes an item. A guarded chest stays shut until its guardian is defeated.

Food pickups are different: walking over one eats it straight away instead of putting it in your bag. They can restore your health and skill points, or grant a small progress bonus to you or an equipped card.

Look for ♨️ hot springs in the wild. Stand on or close to one while out of combat and your health recovers much faster; fighting stops that recovery, so a spring is a breather, not a combat potion.

Reactions, rankings & rewards

The 🙂 button beside the card row opens the emote wheel. Pick an emoji by holding, dragging and releasing, or leave the wheel open with a tap and tap an emoji next. It is a quick reaction for nearby players, not chat text.

Open the 🏆 view in the menu for the top lists. They compare players by collection, species progress, kills, boss kills by level bracket, level and wealth; boss-kill brackets keep early and late bosses comparable.

At certain level milestones you receive a title, coins and a reward card, with a celebration for nearby players. In the menu you can also create an invite link: when a referred newcomer reaches the required progress, both sides receive the referral reward. The invitation is linked once and its reward is paid only once.