So Monday was a Holiday, so my top 10 list has been delayed a day. Today we’re going with Top 10 card games. Now, these games are going to be card driven games, if there’s a big part of the game, set-up, pieces, whatever it might be, that isn’t cards, it won’t be on the list. So Gloomhaven, while the core mechanics are card driven as of what you play for your actions and the modifiers for your attacks, it still has a large table presence.

Here’s the list:

10 – Onirim
You are in a world of dreams in this solo game. You are trying to find some dream doors and avoid nightmares before your deck runs out. This is a solo abstract game, but one that plays pretty quickly and is a lot of fun. The biggest challenge of the game is figuring out how to deal with the nightmares. You have four different ways, you could use a key, but those are valuable resources because of what they can do and how unique they are, you could trash your hand, you could discard five cards from the deck, or you could get rid of a door. All of them are bad for you though, because they will cost you more cards. The game has a lot of shuffling, but it’s a lot of fun. A good solo game that can technically be played with two, but it’s mainly meant to be played solo.

9 – Not Alone
You are part of a crew who has crash landed on a planet. It would be fine, but one person is a monster on the island and that monster is out there trying to pick off the crew. So you have to plan out your turns in such a way that you don’t end up getting killed off and lose too much crew before the rescue ship can arrive. It’s a fun game of cat and mouse and one versus all as the crew can discuss strategy, but they have to do that so the monster and hear and understand. But the players could try and mislead, but if they go to a few spots to get the ship there faster, that could end up with them not using their turns that effectively, since those can only be done once per round. A lot of fun, and a good high tension game.

8 – Say Bye to the Villains
This is one of the hardest cooperative games that I’ve played. We’ve gotten close to winning several times, but we’ve never won. In this game, you and the other players are a group of samurai who are trying to take down a group of villains. You have ten days to play your attacks, increase your speed, and get more health. Because you need to defeat the villain that you’re facing off against. But with that, you also need to figure out what the villains are doing. it might be that they are going to be very fast and hit hard, but might not have much health, so if you can go faster than them, you don’t need to worry too much about damage or health because you’ll first. Or do you try and take the blow, but you can never find out everything you want, so you hope that you’ve planned it out well enough. It’s a slower game for being so small, but it’s a really fun challenge.

7 – The Lost Expedition
This cooperative game intentionally tries to take on the idea of alpha gaming by limiting your communication, but still has a lot of depth to the game play as compared to some that limit your communication. You’re trying to get to the lost city of Z, but to do that, you are playing down cards for a walk both in the morning and evening so that you can progress. But most cards have something bad on them. The trick is playing down these cards, you can’t discuss what you’re playing down or what would be best from the cards in your hand. You have to do that yourself and how you do that changes from morning to evening. And with the things that you have on the cards, most of them are not going to be good things, so can you balance your resources dwindling as well. A fun and fast cooperative game.

6 – Sushi Go Party!
First of back to back food related games, in this game, you’re drafting your best meal. This might be getting sashimi or nigiri or maybe you’re going after green tea ice cream. The game is played over three rounds, and whomever has the most points at the end of three rounds wins. What makes this game a ton of fun is that you change it up, so that might mean that you can create a lower scoring meaner version of the game where you’re worried about not getting that 3rd tofu and making your tofu worthless. Or maybe you’ll do on that gives everyone a ton of points, so there are lots of options to change it up. And once you’ve played one round, the game moves extremely fast and is a lot of fun.

5 – Point Salad
A quick little card game, a point salad game is one where you get points for basically everything that you do. Point Salad, the game, takes that concept and makes it about salad. So now you’re not just getting points, you are making a salad. To do this, you are either drafting two cards of vegetables, or picking up a scoring card. The game is very simple and limited number of cards so that it plays fast at most player counts. But it has a surprising amount of depth and variability because you have to know when to grab a scoring card or if you take a veggie it’ll change up the scoring cards, so you can block an opponent from getting what they might want for scoring? And do you diversify your veggies to scoring in a lot of ways across the board, or are you going to really target scoring for a couple of vegetables?

4 – Hanamikoji
In Hanamikoji you’re trying to win the favor of Geisha by giving them gifts. You do this by playing cards in a very interesting and clever way. Each round, each player has four different actions that they can take. But they can only take each action once. Some of them are simple, such as playing a gift face down that you’ll use to win favor at the end of the round, or discarding two face down. But some are much tougher to figure out, and add in so much depth to the game. Playing two groups of two cards and your opponent selects one of them, or playing three and your opponent gets one of them. It makes a lot of very difficult decisions in the game and what you’re trying to do so often is let your opponent make the tough decisions in place of you. The game also plays very fast, so it’s a great challenge to play a few times in a sitting.

3 – Arkham Horror: The Card Game
First of two living card game, Arkham Horror allows you to investigate strange goings on around Arkham and other locations. It’s based off of the Lovecraftian mythos, but while there are horror elements and monsters, it’s more about how good an investigator that you can be, can you fight off these monsters and investigate and solve the case. I really like that they can use the cards to create such different scenarios. Out of the base box, one of them has you fighting more monsters while you investigate in a house, the other has you out in the town looking for cultists, and they can do even more with it. The only things in this that aren’t cards are a few tokens that you use, which can be used to adjust how difficult the game is, so you can play it for the story, or you can make it nightmarishly hard depending on how you want to play.

2 – Aeon’s End: War Eternal
Another deckbuilding game, this one has a limited number of things that aren’t cards, and it’s basically just player boards and a few counters as you take your team of mages who fight against a monster that is coming through and attacking the city of Gravehold where you are from. It’s a good deck building game that does one very clever thing there you don’t ever shuffle your deck, so you can try and set-up how cards go into your discard pile and set-up future hands of cards to get the most optimal damage or buying power to build up your deck further. And with the number of different mages it works well and gives you a lot of variety as you take different mages up against different nemesis.

1 – Marvel Champions
This living card game allows you to play as your favorite superheroes, though that might be eventually. You build your deck of cards to create your hero and then take them up against some villain. You could fight as Spider-man against Rhino or Captain Marvel versus Ultron out of the base game. What I really love about the game is the way that you can flip back and forth between your alter-ego and super hero side of things. It feels like the comics in that while Spider-Man isn’t around the villains are out there scheming away, but when he’s there, they are going to be fighting him. It feels thematic and there are more and more villains and heroes out there that Fantasy Flight can add to the game, which means that the game will never feel tired.

There are a lot of great card games out there. Especially if you want to go down the deckbuilding route. There are games like Clank! In! Space! is another one that could have made the list, but has too much else going on. But games like Ascension or Dominion, for some that would make a lot of sense for checking out card games as well.

What is your favorite card game? Any from off my list you want to checkout?

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