Card games worth owning: five picks
Five card games cover almost every situation a group runs into: The Crew: Mission Deep Sea for cooperative play, Exploding Kittens for people who do not play games, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion for a campaign, Dominion for competitive play, and 7 Wonders when there are more than four of you. Everything below is why, and where each one stops working.
Why card games at all
A card game is not a lesser board game. Deck-building, drafting and trick-taking are card mechanics first, and the games built on them are as deep as anything with a board. What cards buy you is setup time measured in seconds rather than minutes, a box that fits in a bag, and a table that does not need to be cleared first.
The trade-off is presence. A card game rarely produces the moment where everyone leans over the board at once, and games that depend on spatial position - area control, route building, dungeon crawls with real geography - do not translate to a deck. If that is what your group wants, none of this is a substitute.
The five
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
A cooperative trick-taking game by Thomas Sing, published by Kosmos in 2021. Everyone plays tricks as normal, but the group wins or loses together, and the constraint that makes it work is communication: you may reveal exactly one card from your hand, once, with a token saying whether it is the highest, lowest or only card of its suit. That is all the information anyone gets.
The sequel matters. The original, The Quest for Planet Nine (2019), gives you a logbook of 50 missions to play in order, and once you have finished them the game is essentially over. Mission Deep Sea replaces the logbook with 96 task cards that each carry a difficulty rating, spread over 32 missions. The group draws to a target difficulty, which means the same mission plays differently every time and a group that has outgrown the early missions can dial the number up instead of shelving the box.
Where it stops working: it is a puzzle, and it is genuinely hard. A group that wants to talk over each other and laugh will find the communication restriction airless rather than tense. It also punishes an unequal table - one strong player quietly solving it for everyone else is a failure mode this game invites.
Exploding Kittens
Draw cards until someone draws the bomb; play a Defuse to survive it, or use the other cards to force the person next to you to draw instead. The 2015 Kickstarter still holds the record for the most backers of any campaign, and the Matthew Inman artwork is most of the reason.
Its real job is not being a good game. Its job is being the game you put in front of four people who do not play games and having them understand it before you have finished explaining. It does that better than almost anything else, and there is a full Exploding Kittens review if you want the detail.
Where it stops working: repeatedly. There is very little decision-making, the elimination means the first player out watches the rest of the game, and any group that plays regularly will be bored of it inside a month. Buy it as a tool, not as a game you will keep returning to.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
A standalone campaign game by Isaac Childres, published by Cephalofair in 2020, for one to four players across 25 scenarios. Combat runs on a hand of two cards played simultaneously each turn, with the top of one and the bottom of the other resolving in initiative order, and every card you play is spent until you rest. Running out of cards, not running out of health, is what usually kills you.
The design decision worth paying for is that scenarios are played directly on the pages of a bound book rather than assembled from map tiles, and the first five scenarios teach the rules a few at a time instead of expecting anyone to read the rulebook end to end. Both of those were the reasons people bounced off the original Gloomhaven, and both are fixed here. There is a fuller Gloomhaven review covering the larger game.
Where it stops working: it is a campaign, so it wants the same people at the same table repeatedly over months. A group that meets irregularly will lose the thread. It is also the most expensive thing on this list and the least portable, since the book and the character boxes are not a bag-sized commitment.
Dominion
Donald X. Vaccarino’s 2008 game invented deck-building, won the Spiel des Jahres in 2009, and remains the cleanest expression of it. Everyone starts with the same weak ten-card deck, buys cards from a shared market into a discard pile, and reshuffles - so the whole game is a bet on which cards will come up together in three turns’ time.
The base box holds 25 kingdom card piles and every game uses ten of them, which is where the replay value actually comes from: the set of ten changes what the good strategy is, not just the flavour. There is no board and no direct interaction in most setups, which some people read as a solitaire race and others read as a relief.
Where it stops working: the market you set up on the first night decides how much fun the game is, and a randomly chosen ten can produce a flat game that makes the whole thing look shallow. Use one of the recommended sets in the rulebook for the first few plays. The expansions are also a genuine cost commitment if the group takes to it.
7 Wonders
Antoine Bauza’s 2010 civilisation game, published by Repos Production, and the first winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2011. Everyone holds a hand of cards, picks one, plays it, and passes the rest on - all simultaneously. That drafting structure is why it takes roughly half an hour whether three people are playing or seven, which is a rare and undervalued property.
Seven players at one table for thirty minutes with no downtime is close to unique. It is the answer to the party where more people turned up than the group’s usual game supports.
Where it stops working: at two, where it needs a special variant with a dummy player and stops being the same game - 7 Wonders Duel is a separate, better designed product for that count. The iconography also takes a full game to become readable, so the first play is slower and more confusing than the rules length suggests.
Three that nearly made it
- Love Letter: Seiji Kanai’s 2012 deduction game, originally sixteen cards total. A complete game in about ten minutes, and the best filler on this list. It is thin by design, so it belongs alongside something heavier rather than as the evening’s main event.
- Munchkin: Steve Jackson Games, 2001, and a genuinely funny parody of dungeon crawling. It also runs long, and the endgame turns into everyone ganging up on whoever is ahead, which is either the point or the problem depending on the group.
- Codenames: Vlaada Chvatil’s 2015 word-association game and the Spiel des Jahres winner in 2016. It is on the boundary of what counts as a card game, and it works with almost any number of people. See the Codenames board game review.
By occasion
Family and mixed ages. Exploding Kittens and Love Letter, because neither needs a rules explanation longer than the first round. UNO belongs in the same bracket and most households already own it.
Competitive. Dominion at two to four, 7 Wonders above that. Both reward playing well without letting one player attack another directly, which keeps a competitive evening from turning sour.
Cooperative. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea if the group likes puzzles, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion if it wants a story that continues. They fail in opposite directions: The Crew is too austere for a loud table, Jaws of the Lion is too much commitment for a casual one.
Budget and storage
Most of these sit between 10 and 25 euros. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is the outlier at roughly 35 to 45, which is still low for the number of hours in the box.
Storage is the argument people underrate. A single shelf that holds one large board game will hold ten or twelve card games, and card games survive being moved, lent and travelled with in a way that a box full of punched cardboard and small components does not.
The sensible way to start a collection is one game from each of the three categories - one cooperative, one competitive, one that anybody can play - rather than three games of the same type. That covers far more evenings than three well-reviewed deck-builders would.
Choosing the first one
Match the game to the group rather than to the reviews. Quick rounds and laughter: Exploding Kittens or Love Letter. Puzzles solved together: The Crew. Long-term progression and a deck that changes: Dominion, or Jaws of the Lion if the group can commit to a campaign.
Check the player count before buying, not after. Several of these have a stated range that overstates where they are good - 7 Wonders technically plays two and should not be played at two, and cooperative games generally get easier as the count drops because coordination gets simpler.
One quiet advantage over miniatures games: a card game bought today is ready to play the moment the shrink comes off. Nothing needs assembling, sorting into a foam tray, or painting before it is usable, and it will still be in that state in five years.
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