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James Austin is a writer covering games and hobbies, which means he is in a constant cycle of learning board games and teaching them to people. Trimmer Line
After a new round of testing, we’ve added Bohnanza as a negotiation game pick.
In terms of versatility and value for money, gaming doesn’t have many deals that are better than a traditional 52-card deck. For a couple of bucks, you gain access to thousands of games, and due to their depth and complexity, they have been staples of parlors and kitchen tables for generations of players.
But where the traditional deck is a jack of all trades (get it?), modern designer card games are specialists. These games break the familiar forms, allowing players to step beyond the storied suits to bring new game mechanics, choices, and play styles to the card table.
We’ve researched and played 39 such games across a range of genres—including trick-taking, deck-building, bluffing, and others—to find the most engaging, surprising, and replayable experiences for a variety of tastes.
To narrow our testing criteria, we focused on designer games instead of traditional 52-card deck games (though we’ve included a few examples in each section to highlight the type of game we’re talking about).
For this guide we also decided not to include games like Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering that incentivize extra purchases as a part of the experience.
To find the likeliest candidates, I looked through lists at popular review sites like Shut Up & Sit Down (video), Wargamer, and Dicebreaker. I also researched the lists of popular and best-selling games that fit our criteria on Amazon and BoardGameGeek.
I spoke with John McLeod, editor of Pagat.com, and Candice Harris, a media creator for BoardGameGeek, to get their perspective on what makes a great card game. Finally, I chatted with Rich Kameda of Tannen’s Magic Shop in Manhattan to better understand the physical attributes of cards themselves.
This game delivers all the bluffing of poker, but with much simpler rules. It’s quick and easy to teach, and it’s a game that you’ll want to play again and again.
Skull is incredibly simple. Each player has just four cards: three roses and one skull.
At the start of each round, you choose one card to place face down. In subsequent rounds, you get to choose between putting another card on top of your last to form a stack or bidding on how many played cards you can flip over before you find a skull (beginning with your own stack, but from any other player’s stack after that).
If you win the bid and then succeed without finding a skull, you get a point and you’re halfway to winning the game. If you fail and flip over a skull, you lose one of your four cards (either chosen randomly by an opponent or one you choose yourself, depending on where you found the skull). If a player succeeds twice, or if only one player remains with a card, the game is over and that player wins.
Poker has never given me the thrill it seems to give others, but Skull really delivers on its promise. The first time you play, you’re all about trying to win bids so you can earn one of the two points needed to win. But soon, you’ll find how much fun it is to lay traps for your friends, bidding early to convince them that you didn’t plant a skull at the top of your stack, then sitting back and waiting for them to flip it over.
You can play this game without bluffing, but it would wring most of the fun out of your playthroughs. If your gaming friend group isn’t into deceit as a mechanic, this probably isn’t the game for you.
A slow burn of a game that delivers plenty of decisions with a low barrier of entry.
Dominion is the progenitor of a game mechanic called deck-building. Players each start with an identical deck of cards. On every turn, you draw cards from your personal deck, which you can use to buy cards from a central market. These new cards make their way into your deck and can be used to take extra actions, buy more cards, or just get you points at the end of the game.
Like the best traditional card games, Dominion is easy to learn and fun to play, but reveals levels of complexity and difficult choices as you move past your first few plays.
Most important, you have to balance buying victory point cards that take up space in your hand against selecting cards with more immediately useful powers. The catch is points cards are limited, and if other players grab them first, they might not be available to you later. This makes for an engaging and tricky puzzle.
The ability to mix and match the card types that come in the basic version of the game is great if you’re an experienced player, but the array of cards you have to sort through may make setup intimidating for beginners. The inset organizer helps mitigate the issue, but also makes the box gigantic for a card game.
This game has a ton of opportunities to make players feel smart, and the mix of creative cardplay and risky bidding that it encourages makes for surprisingly fun rounds.
Cat in the Box mostly plays like any other trick-taking game—think Hearts, Oh Hell, Spades, and Bridge.
Play progresses over a number of rounds (called tricks), and in each round a player starts by playing a card of a particular value and suit. Whoever plays the highest card in that suit wins the trick. If you don’t have a card in that suit, you may play other cards including a trump card—a special card that wins even if it isn’t the right suit.
The deliciously thematic twist in Cat in the Box—a play on Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment—is that the cards don’t have suits. Instead, players declare the suit the moment they play it. They also leave a token of their color on a game board that tracks which cards have been played, eliminating that suit/card combo from the round.
You get points for winning tricks, and if you bid correctly on how many tricks you’ll win, you get additional points for the longest continuous set of tokens you’ve placed on the board.
Cat in the Box adds two extra layers of choice to the classic trick-taking format: suitless cards and the tracking board you place tokens on. The latter ensures you don’t accidentally play a card that has already been played, but it’s also a huge factor in how you earn points in the game since you need to think about setting up a big line of tokens in addition to winning tricks. But there’s a sting in the tail: If you don’t make your bid, the effort you put into the token line is worthless.
Balancing all of these choices is what makes this game work so well and helps it improve on the format by giving more opportunities for players to feel clever, which is where trick-taking really shines.
The box packs a surprising amount of stuff into a moderately svelte package, but people with larger hands may find the token organization finicky to impossible.
In addition, Cat in the Box isn’t great as a two-player game. If you’re looking for a better trick-taking duel, consider The Fox in the Forest, which is featured in our guide to two-player games.
Even by card game standards, this game is remarkably small and portable. But the gameplay—which involves assembling the longest runs or largest set of cards you can—is surprisingly expansive.
In Scout, you’re dealt a hand that you can’t rearrange. On your turn, you’re challenged with playing a group of cards from that static hand—either a run or a set—that’s larger or of a higher value than what a previous player played.
If you do, you get to take the previous players’ cards as points, and the turn advances to the next player. If you can’t (or don’t want to), you can “scout” by taking a card from the currently active run or set and placing it anywhere in their hand either side up.
The round ends when any player runs out of cards, or if every player scouts on their turn instead of playing a card. Every card left in your hand counts against you. The scores are tallied, and the game continues until you’ve played as many rounds as there are players in the game.
The greatest joy in Scout is watching longtime card players squirm when they realize they can’t rearrange their hand. But beyond that, this game is easily portable, the play is quick, and it’s colorful and delightful to look at.
But that main organizational rule is really what makes Scout so interesting, because you’re forced to choose between small, immediate plays that might have inconsequential payoffs and long-term strategies that depend on the right card coming along at the right time. It’s a delicious tension.
Scout includes a ton of little fiddly tokens, which work fine for keeping score but scatter easily around a table and become difficult to keep track of. I’d much prefer a small scoring notepad and a pencil. Like Cat in the Box, this game also doesn’t work as well with just two players.
Trying to signal what cards everyone else has in their hands is the main focus of this game where cards are all held backwards.
Hanabi is a cooperative card game in which you play cards from your hand in sequences of five. But of course, there’s a catch: You’re never allowed to look at your hand. Instead, you hold the cards facing out, with their information visible to everyone else.
On your turn, you can either play a card from your hand (without looking at it), spend one of only a few timer tokens to communicate a specific thing about another player’s hand (such as “this is a yellow card” or “these two cards are fours”), or discard a card to refresh those timer tokens.
If you play a card out of order, you must flip over one of three fuse tokens (also called lightning tokens in some editions). If you flip over all three, everyone loses.
Once you’ve run out of cards to draw, everyone takes one more turn, and then you add the highest value card of each run to find your team’s total score.
Like all of the best communication games, Hanabi is at least 85% frustration.
You always want to communicate more information than you’re allowed, and you have little room for mistakes. Worse, the other players never do quite what you want—even though you’ve given them perfect clues.
But the pleasure of a game like Hanabi (or The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, another game we like) comes in the collective struggle against that frustration. It’s the horror of watching your friend pick the worst possible card and biting your tongue so you don’t blurt out their mistake.
That despair is balanced by the sheer joy you feel when you give them a perfectly phrased hint. Their eyes widen with recognition. They confidently play the one card that you all need them to play. Everyone wins.
This game is about identifying colors and numbers, and while each suit does have indicators other than color (a unique firework shape and kanji symbol), those differentiators aren’t super helpful. The fireworks look similar, and unless most of your table is conversant in kanji, the symbols probably won’t help either.
Because of this, colorblind folks (and people with other visual impairments) are going to have a hard time engaging with this game.
A brain-burning cooperative game that can be played in just 15 minutes, with a deck that’s slimmer than most wallets.
Every game of Sprawlopolis tasks you and your friends with using the deck of 18 cards to build out a small city. (Each card has four quadrants representing different zones of a city, like parks or manufacturing sectors.) The game begins by randomly flipping over three cards from the deck, which show the scoring criteria and the target score for the round. Then, the first player draws a hand of three cards, and the other players each get one card for their hand.
On your turn, you play one card horizontally in the shared playing space, then pass your two remaining cards to the left before drawing another card from the deck.
Play continues until all the cards have been played, at which point you assess how you did based on the goals uncovered at the beginning of the game. If the team beats the sum of the numbers on the objective cards, everyone wins.
With its scant 18 cards, small size, and breezy setup, Sprawlopolis disguises a tightly designed—almost cruelly sharp—game that feels damn near impossible to win but remains a joy to bash your head against.
It’s a game that’s fun to challenge your friends with, not in spite of but because of those designed annoyances. The friction is the point; it makes the process of overcoming the straight-jacket-like restrictions so satisfying when you—shockingly, miraculously—pull it off.
Because of the random goals and target points, the game can sometimes feel overly random. But each game only takes 15 minutes or so to play through, and it’s so easy to breeze into another game that you tend to forget the frustration right away.
An active and boisterous game about trading and planting beans.
Bohnanza is a game about trading, planting, and selling beans. Players are each dealt a hand of cards (beans) that they can’t reorder (much like in Scout). And they are given a play mat with two or three (depending on the player count) “bean fields” on it.
On their turn, players must plant the bean from the front of their hand into one of their fields—either any type of bean into an empty field or the same type of bean into an already-planted one. After players plant, they flip over two more beans from the deck and the trade floor opens. Players can offer any sort of trade for either of the flipped over beans, even the promise of future trades. But the catch is that any bean traded that round must be planted, which puts additional pressure on the small number of fields each player has.
Once a player has a good number of beans in their field, or if they are forced to make way for a new type of bean, they can sell their beans, yielding a number of points depending on how many beans they sell. The rarer the bean, the more points they earn.
I’m a fairly well-read guy. I’ve invested in the stock market. I have a 401(k). But this game is a better education in market forces (and their irrationality) than any class I’ve taken or article I’ve read.
The requirement to always plant the first card in your hand, the limited places to plant, and being responsible for the two cards that are flipped over all create huge pressure to trade. As in real-world markets, here it doesn’t matter how much a bean is actually “worth” (though the rarity of a given bean is helpfully displayed on each card). What matters is what other players are willing to trade for it at that specific moment. There’s always incentive to wheel and deal, and players’ motives shift moment to moment, rewarding those who can read the field and know how to put pressure on trading partners at exactly the right time.
Bohnanza is also a game that everyone at the table can be actively involved with all the time, even more so when they’re not the active player. Proposing deals and lobbying, cajoling, or bribing their trading partners with promises of better trades in the future lend the game the feeling of a surreal stock market—a chaotic trading floor powered by beans and dreams.
This is a very active and interactive game. Social butterflies will love it, but folks who are more reserved might not warm up to it as quickly or easily.
If you want a deck-building battle game with gorgeous production value: Queen by Midnight is the way to go. The impeccably themed and wonderfully illustrated game features asymmetric character options, satisfyingly complex gameplay, and a pretty dice tower centerpiece that gives the whole package a premium feeling and table presence.
The downside of all that production is a high price tag and large box, especially by card game standards. But the rewarding gameplay loop and deep strategy make it a worthy investment if you want a game that can be both a beautiful object and a fun experience.
If you want a beautiful deck of cards that happens to come with a brutal co-op game: Pick up Regicide. It’s a tough, cooperative game that tasks players with defeating the face cards in a traditional 52-card deck.
Though this is played with what’s essentially a normal 52-card deck, it also comes with helpful info cards and a svelte rulebook that make playing the game easier than if you used that old Bicycle deck you have laying around.
Plus, our testers found the retro-arcade isometric fantasy art style really charming. We’d happily make this our go-to deck for any traditional card game.
If you’re looking for a fun puzzle to play solo: Food Chain Island is a lovely little logic puzzle. In this game, you lay out all of the cards—each with a number and power associated with a different animal—in a randomly ordered grid. Throughout the game, you try to condense that grid into three or fewer stacks by having higher-number animals eat adjacent animals of a lower number.
It’s a tricky puzzle that’s more zen than brain-burning, and I love it as a casual time-killer. And like other games by this studio (Button Shy, which also makes Sprawlopolis), it easily fits into a pocket so you can take it anywhere.
If you like your friends but would prefer they talk less: Try The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a cooperative trick-taking card game that drastically limits conversation at the table.
In The Crew, you’re dealt a hand of cards and then randomly assigned tasks based on an included campaign mission log. These tasks can include things like winning a particular trick, winning different tricks in a certain order, or even making sure another player never wins a trick.
Players are not allowed to talk about their cards with other players. Instead, once per round, they can use a communication token to indicate how many of a type of card they have in their hand. It’s a fun exercise in trying to intuit what your friends are planning, and how you can integrate into that plan so you all succeed.
If you want a more complex game and are okay with a steep learning curve: Race for the Galaxy packs a galaxy’s worth of functions and powers into a single deck of cards.
In Race for the Galaxy, players compete to build a galaxy-spanning civilization. To do this, they can choose each turn to draw more cards, build developments, settle new worlds, produce materials, or spend already-mined materials. In taking these actions, they collect points until an endgame is reached and a winner is declared.
Race for the Galaxy is especially notable for its diverse strategic approaches to conquering the galaxy, and the flexibility of the cards—each one can be used in about five different ways—contributes to that openness. On the flip side, though, the game uses more pictographs than some ancient Egyptian temples. It can take several playthroughs to learn what they all mean and how you can use them. In turn, that makes this game rewarding but quite tedious to learn.
Aeon’s End, a cooperative deck-building game that tasks players with pushing back Kaiju-like creatures to defend the fantasy city of Gravehold, is remarkably deep and intricate. Players have a starting deck that they use to either attack the “nemesis” or to buy new cards from a market. But in Aeon’s End, players don’t reshuffle the discard pile when they refresh their deck; the cards stack back in the order they’ve been played. This adds a layer of plannability that other deck-builders don’t have, which (along with complex rules around individual cards) gives you a lot to process. It’s a fun and intense cooperative card game, but we felt it was more complex than the games we were aiming for in this guid
Arboretum is a pretty and relaxing game that tasks players with building the most appealing path of trees in their own arboretum. The game has a multiplayer solitaire kind of feel to it—it’s exceedingly chill to play—but it’s somewhat spoiled by a fiddly scoring system.
Boss Monster is a retro, Nintendo-inspired game in which players take on the roles of classic video game bosses and build dungeons that lure in adventurers and kill them with various traps and monsters. It’s an easy game to teach—and fun to play—but it doesn’t have a ton of replayability.
Cockroach Poker is for folks who enjoy bluffing but want more randomness than Skull provides. It requires you to slowly gather information about played cards before they’re flipped over. This lends the game to more bluffs and double bluffs than you get in Skull, but we liked that game’s comparatively straightforward play a little more.
Fantasy Realms is a hand-building game (a bit like five-card stud poker, but without betting or bluffing) where players try to assemble the best seven-card hand (called a realm) of fantasy tropes at the table. The variety of cards and the way their powers work together lend this game a fun energy and generates occasionally fantastical discussion during scoring, as players try to suss out what their realm would be like. But we found that the scoring part just feels like homework, which made it a letdown.
Fort takes a basic deck-building mechanic and augments it with an asymmetric collection of player powers and wonderful art from Kyle Ferrin (who also illustrated Root, one of our favorite strategy games). We enjoyed it but found it to be more complex than the sort of games we were prioritizing in this guide.
Hero Realms is a fantasy deck-building game that shares the same basic design as Star Realms, another of our favorite two-player games. It works for two to four players, but we found that when we wanted to play a deck-builder with more than two players, we consistently reached for Dominion instead.
Monopoly Deal takes the parts of Monopoly that actually work and compresses them into a 15-minute card game. The pace is sprightly, and the gameplay overall is much less frustrating than its traditional board game cousin’s. But it was still too simple and random compared with our picks.
No Thanks feels like a perfect family game: It’s easy enough for younger players to pick up quickly, but it has enough interesting choices to keep older or more experienced players engaged. But we felt it was still a little too simple compared with our other picks.
Point Salad is both a game and a gaming term—one used to describe a game in which players fulfill a bunch of unconnected goals in a race to earn the most points. In Point Salad (the game), players still race to get the most points, but they can also play points cards that change the value of any particular card they’ve already played, or are planning to play, on the fly. The ever-shifting value of each card brings an exciting and frenetic energy to the game, but it doesn’t allow for the depth of play or novelty that our other picks provide.
Silver is a card-based take on the popular Werewolf games (and plays a lot like the traditional card game Golf). It’s an interesting spin on familiar gameplay, but we found that Skull was a better iteration of the “trying to figure out what’s in other player’s hands” dynamic that these games evoke.
Smash Up is a game with a comic sensibility pulled right from internet’s adolescence in the early aughts. Players pick two factions of cards that they’ll shuffle together into their deck—including things like aliens, robots, dinosaurs, and ninjas—and use them to win any of five bases. The way the factions interact makes for a dynamic and replayable game but didn’t do enough to really separate itself from the pack in our testing.
Startups is a game that simulates the shifting value and ownership of startup companies. Players are tasked with collecting enough cards to take a majority stake in a company, but they only get points at the end of the game if other players have also purchased cards in that company. It’s a quick and enjoyable game, but we found our picks were either easier to teach and play or more fun.
Take 5 is a game about pushing your luck and trying to goad other players into over-leveraging themselves. It’s easy to learn (and teach) and has a way of creating funny moments of schadenfreude. But it wasn’t as lively as our picks.
Trailblazers is a layout game similar to Sprawlopolis, but instead of cooperatively building a city, players are competing to build the best series of recreation trails in a wilderness. Players take turns placing a card from their hand, which includes sections of hiking, biking, and kayaking trails, and then passing the remaining cards to the player on their left. It’s a game where your options look wide open when you start, but they quickly narrow, foiling even the best players’ plans almost instantly. That creates a fun and funny game of hubris and regret, but we think Sprawlopolis is a better take on the same idea.
Tussie Mussie has a similar premise to Cockroach Poker, where players slide cards to each other and try to predict their behavior. The difference is that, in this case, you’re passing around lovely flower bouquets instead of bugs and vermin. It’s a subtle game that leads to a lot of raised eyebrows and shifty looks as players assess what cards are where, but we prefer Skull’s simplicity and tension.
Uno has one advantage over most of the other games we tested: Pretty much everyone in the US is familiar with it. As Pagat.com’s John McLeod told me, “A good game is the one that your friends already know, because then you can just get into it and play it.” But we found that, even taking that ease of play into account, the other games we tested all offered a more complete and interesting experience than this rec-room mainstay.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
John McLeod, editor of Pagat.com, Zoom interview, March 6, 2023
Candice Harris, media creator for BoardGameGeek, Zoom interview, April 10, 2023
Rich Kameda, magic instructor at Tannen’s Magic, in-person interview, May 2, 2023
James Austin is a staff writer currently covering games and hobbies, but he’s also worked on just about everything Wirecutter covers—from board games to umbrellas—and after being here for a few years he has gained approximate knowledge of many things. In his free time he enjoys taking photos, running D&D, and volunteering for a youth robotics competition.
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Dual Power Trimmer Line Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).