ndIn terms of versatility and value for money, there aren’t many games that offer a better deal than a traditional 52-card deck. For just a few dollars, you can access thousands of games, and because of their depth and complexity, they’ve become a staple in generations of players’ living rooms and kitchen tables.
But while traditional decks are jacks of all trades (get it?), modern designer card games are specialists. These games break up familiar formats, allowing players to go beyond legendary suits and bring new game mechanics, options, and play styles to the table.
By researching hundreds of card games, we’ve selected some of the best card games.
1. Skull
Skull is pretty simple. Each player has just four cards: three roses and a skull.
How to Play
If you win the bid and then succeed, but don’t find a skull, you get one point and you win halfway. An’d If you fail and flip a skull, you lose one of four cards. Either randomly chosen by your opponent or one of your own, depending on where you found the skull. If a player succeeds twice, or only one player is left holding a card. The game ends and that player wins.
What’s Special
Poker has never given me the thrills it seems to give others, but Skull really delivers on its promise. When you first play, you’re all about trying to win the bid so you can get the one of two you need to win. But soon, you’ll find out how fun it is to set traps for your friends, bid early to make them believe you didn’t place a skull on the top of your stack, and then sit back and wait for them to flip it.
2. Dominion
Dominion is the granddaddy of a game mechanic called deck building. It’s also the best card game.
How to Play
Each player starts with the same deck of board game cards. In each turn, you draw cards from your personal deck, which you can use to buy cards from the central market. These new cards go into your deck and can used to perform additional actions, buy more cards, or just get points at the end of the game.
What’s Special
Like the best traditional card games, Dominion is easy to learn and fun to play, but it reveals complexities and difficult options as you get through the first few games.
3. Cat in the Box
Cat in the Box mostly played like any other trick game.
How to Play
The game played over a number of rounds (called tricks). And in each round, players start by playing a card of a specific value and suit. Whoever plays the highest card in that suit wins. If you don’t have a card of that suit. You can play other cards, Including the Joker. Which a special card that wins even if the suit is wrong.
The fun twist on the theme in Cat in the Box (a play on Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment) is that cards don’t have suits. Instead, players announce a suit the moment they play it. They also leave tokens of their color on the game board to keep track of which cards have been played, thus eliminating that suit/card combination from the round.
You get points for tricks won, and if you bid correctly on how many tricks you’ll win. You’ll get extra points for the longest consecutive set of tokens you’ve placed on the board.
What’s Special
Balancing all of these options is what makes this game so great. And helps it improve the format by giving players more opportunities to feel clever. Which is where sleight of hand really shines.
