Best Card Games 2019
Our extensive collection of free online card games spans 10 classic solitaire titles, as well as several other best in class card games including 2 classic versions of Bridge, Classic Solitaire, Canfield Solitaire, and Blackjack, to name a few. Oct 22, 2020 Dennis Patrick / Features / Best Card Games, Best CCG, Card City Nights, CCG PC, CCG PS4, CCG Xbox One, Coin Crypt, Duelyst, Ederon, Elemental Kingdoms, Eternal, Gwent, Hearthstone, Infinity Wars. 2019 Golden Geek Best Card Game Winner. 2019 Golden Geek Best Cooperative Game Winner. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. 2019 Golden Geek Best Family.
Playing cards have been around for quite a while — hundreds of years — and with all the games to choose from, both modern and classic, cards are even more fun today than they were in 867 BCE.
Whether you’re looking for a quick and simple game to play at parties or a strategic partnership game, there are plenty of games you can play with a standard deck of cards.
1. Party Games
These are games that are quick to teach, quick to play, and always hilarious.
Spoons
3 to 13 players
In Spoons, there are no turns — players are quickly passing cards to try to get a hand of four of a kind. There are several spoons (or similar objects) in the middle of the table, one fewer than the number of players.
You can pass as quickly or slowly as you want, but if you go too slowly, you might end up with a buildup of cards next to you. Once a player has four of a kind in their hand, they may grab a spoon from the middle. As soon as one player grabs a spoon, anyone else can grab one. The player who fails to grab a spoon loses a life, and play continues until there is a winner.
If you don’t have spoons, you can also play by having players stick out their tongue when they have four of a kind or when they see another player sticking out their tongue.
Cuckoo
3 or more players
This incredibly simple game is a great choice for families, though it works just as well in a bar.
Each player has three lives, which can be marked with a token or simply remembered. The dealer deals one card to each player, and the player to the left of the dealer goes first.
The objective is to avoid being the player with the lowest card at the end of a round. On your turn, you may choose to keep your card or swap it with the player on your left. After everyone has gone, the player (or players) with the lowest card loses a life. The last player in wins.
Stress/James Bond
2 to 5 players
James Bond is a lightning speed game of racing to make groups of four cards. The deck is divided into thirteen piles of four cards, with one pile dealt face up to form a central group of four cards that everyone can reach. The remaining decks are divided among the players.
When the game begins, each player can look at any one of their piles at a time and may swap cards with the middle cards. The first player to have only groups of four of a kind wins.
2. Strategic games
If you have a small group looking for a clever game of wits, there are many classics to choose from.
Hearts
4 players
This game for four pits players against each other to see who can take the fewest points.
The entire deck is dealt out, and players take turns playing cards in tricks (in which one card is played per player). The highest card of the suit led takes the trick.
Every Heart in the game is worth one point, and the dreaded Queen of Spades is worth a massive thirteen points, so winning tricks is usually a bad thing.
The endless strategies make it easy to play this game for hours and hours.
Spades
4 players
Grab a partner for this cunning game of trust and trick-taking.
Spades is a trick-taking game in which two teams of two make bids to guess how many tricks they can win. Spades is always the trump suit, so a Spade will beat a card of any other suit. Your team’s bid determines how many points you earn (or lose if you don’t take enough tricks). The first team to 500 points wins.
Knowing your hand—and trusting your partner—are key to this sometimes cutthroat trick-taking game.
Up Down
3 to 8 players
Also known as “Oh, Hell!,” this trick-taking game has its roots in other classics like Whist and Bridge.
Each player is dealt a number of cards (which will change from one round to the next) and must guess how many tricks they will win. The number of tricks in a round is equal to the number of cards the players are holding.
The trump suit changes from one round to the next. Because you can only score points if your bid is dead-on, this tense game leads to great failures and great victories.
Palace
2 to 4 players
Palace is a “shedding” game in which players are racing to be the first one with no cards left.
Each player is dealt three cards face down and a hand of six cards, of which they choose three to put face up on their three face down cards. Then, everyone is dealt a draw pile.
Players take turns playing cards from their hand to the center of the table. Each card played must be equal or greater in value than the previous card, or you must pick up the entire pile.
Once your draw pile is gone, you can start playing from your three piles. The first player to empty all three piles wins.
Peter McPherson is a writer for BestReviews. BestReviews is a product review company with a singular mission: to help simplify your purchasing decisions and save you time and money. BestReviews never accepts free products from manufacturers and purchases every product it reviews with its own funds.
BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers. BestReviews and its newspaper partners may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Ars Cardboard
View more storiesINDIANAPOLIS—If it's early August, you can count on one thing: we're gonna be in downtown Indianapolis with 70,000 other board gamers, forgoing sleep, food, and general wellbeing to play a truly ridiculous amount of new tabletop games at Gen Con, the self-described 'Best Four Days in Gaming.' Gen Con is America's largest and longest-running tabletop games convention. 2019 was the con's 52nd year, bringing with it a record-breaking 538 exhibiting companies and a truly impressive 19,600 ticketed events. (If you want some sense of what that cardboard chaos looks like, our Gen Con 2019 image gallery is a good place to start.)
And then there are the games—more games than you could play in a lifetime, all being released at once. We sifted through the chaos to bring you a big list of games we think you should be paying attention to going into the last few months of the year. With such a massive amount of games on offer, we couldn't get to everything we wanted to—your correspondent is just one man!—but we think our list has something for everyone on it. Roleplaying games were sadly outside the scope of this article, so be sure to check out our coverage of perhaps the most anticipated roleplaying title at this year's Gen Con: Pathfinder. Developer Paizo debuted the game's second edition at this year's conference more than a decade after the beloved RPG debuted.
But back to our list—these games should largely be available soon. If a specific title catches your eye, make sure to check in with your favorite local or online game store in the near future for info on when they'll be getting it in. And if you're really one to plan out your play in advance, it's never too early to consider it: next year's Gen Con returns to Indy and runs July 30 through August 2, 2020.
Parks
Henry Audubon, Keymaster Games, 1-5 players, 40-60 min, age 9+
If Parks were a bad game, I’d still be tempted to recommend it based solely on the strength of its stunning presentation. Thankfully there's no need for such silliness; the underlying game is also great.
Parks is a game about US national parks that's a little like Tokaido, in that players all move along a path to pick up various rewards from each spot. But whereas Tokaido is a set-collection game, Parks focuses on resource management. The resources here are sunlight, water, trees, mountains, and wildlife—or, I guess, the memories of those things that you collect as you go along your travels. When you reach the end of the trail, you can “visit” a national park by trading in the correct resources and securing a beautifully illustrated card of the park (the thematic underpinnings get a little shaky here, but just go with it). You can also take pictures, fill your canteen up with water to get special actions, and pick up gear cards that give you ongoing bonuses.
AdvertisementThe game features gorgeous art from the Fifty-Nine Park Print Series, and the rest of the components are equally handsome. An all-around lovely little game that could easily serve as a gateway game for newbies or a chill night-ender for seasoned gamers.
Pandemic: Rapid Response
Kane Klenko, Z-Man Games, 2-4 players, 20 minutes, age 8+
Do you love the panicked feeling you get trying to save humanity from a world-ending epidemic in Pandemic but wish the game was more hectic? Friend, have I got a game for you.
Pandemic: Rapid Response, a new Target-exclusive game, puts a “real-time” spin on the co-op classic, trading Pandemic’s globetrotting card collecting for frantic, desperate dice rolling. Players in Rapid Response are an elite team of scientists, doctors, and specialists traveling around the world in a specialized plane while cooking up cures to the diseases popping up in the world's major cities. Each turn, players roll six dice—and can then reroll them Yahtzee-style—in order to generate resources that are used in the cures. Resources are then moved to the plane's cargo hold and are ready to be dropped off in the cities around the board containing outbreak cards (assuming you can roll enough plane icons to get you to the desired location). Watch out, though, as generating resources also causes waste—create too much waste and you lose.
Of course, you're doing all of this under the watchful eye of an always-depleting two-minute sand timer. Every time it runs out, you add an outbreak card and lose a time token. Lose all your time tokens, lose the game. Cure a city to get back a time token; cure all the affected cities to win. Pandemic is a cooperative game that's notorious for its potential for 'quarterbacking'—an alpha gamer telling everyone else what to do on their turns—and while that element could still be present here, the game's fast pace makes it less of an issue. If you're ready for a 20-minute panic attack, this is your game.
Black Angel
Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, & Alain Orban, Pearl Games, 60-120 minutes, age 12+
Well, we’ve gone and done it. Humanity’s reckless ravaging of Earth has reached its inevitable conclusion: a spent planet and the end of human habitability. But before we go, the nations of the world have gotten together one last time to load our genetic heritage on an intergalactic frigate and send it on its way to Spes, the planet most likely to sustain life for a new human civilization. Who’s crewing the ship on this long journey? You are, of course, and you’re an AI.
AdvertisementBlack Angel is semi-cooperative in the sense that if you and your opponents succumb to the aliens attacking your ship and never make it to new-Earth, things will go badly for you. But every player is competing to prove that he or she is the most worthy AI to head up operations on the new planet (the other AIs will be summarily shut down). There are a ton of interlocking mechanics here; you'll be going on missions, fending off attacking aliens, upgrading your technology, and grabbing end-game scoring opportunities.
The game bears some similarity to a game that two of the designers previously worked on, the well-loved medieval France sim Troyes. But man is Black Angel's theme cooler. The game was one of the most hyped-up of the con, and it's the one I'm most looking forward to exploring in the coming months.
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
Best Card Games For Adults
Michael Boggs, Nate French, & Caleb Grace, Fantasy Flight Games, 1-4 players
When I first heard that Fantasy Flight Games was releasing a new Marvel living card game (a somewhat wallet-friendlier collectible card game), I was instantly bored. But when I heard it was going to be a cooperative game, I knew I had to get a demo in. Co-op CCG-type games are few and far between, and the ones that FFG has released in the past (Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and
Arkham Horror: The Card GameBest Board Card Games 2019
) have been generally excellent and a nice change of pace from the countless two-player card battlers choking the market.Marvel Champions seems to take inspiration from both of those earlier FFG games while injecting some Marvel thematic flair into the mix. The base game—which for the first time in an FFG LCG includes a complete set of cards—comes with five heroes (Spider-Man, Iron Man, She-Hulk, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel) and three villains (Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron). Scenarios pair a villain with a deck of scheme cards, and you and your friends can pick from among the heroes to try to save the world yet again. The villains use their turns to advance their evil schemes and attack the players; the players, of course, use their turns to thwart the schemes and fight back through the usual card-game combo-rific antics. Once per turn, players can flip their character card between hero and alter-ego sides to gain access to different abilities, a cool little thematic and mechanical flourish.
Best Card Games Online
The game looks like it might be a bit lighter than some of the other FFG card games we're used to (understandable, given the broad appeal of the subject matter) but we're hoping it will still be a fun, continuously updated co-op (or solo) romp.