The game ends up as a supremely satisfying exercise in slowly building your deck into an efficient tool, so that you might snap up victory point cards all at once, near the end of the game.

The problem is, that victory point cards (which for the most part do nothing aside from giving you game-winning points) dilute your deck. The core gameplay is simple: Each turn you can play an action and buy a card, be it an action card, a money card or a victory point card. The granddaddy of these sorts of games is Dominion.ĭominion has been around for years, but its developer has kept it fresh with over a dozen expansions to the base game. Slowly, then, the hands they play with each turn transform to allow new strategies throughout the game. Essentially, players draft or 'buy' cards in a deck-building game to shuffle into their draw decks. Deck-building games like Star Realms let you buy and trade cards to create a hand that can defeat your opponent in combat, while Munchkin has the feel of a fully-fledged board game without using a board or counters.ĭeck building is a relatively recent development in card games. Munchkin is a staple at my gaming table and long may it remain so.

Luck is heavily involved when drawing random cards, but skill is also a factor in how you use those cards to your advantage. The ever-expanding nature of the game means endless replayability, and it encapsulates everything good about the card game genre. Knowing that 'best' is very subjective when it comes to games, I choose Munchkin as the best overall.

Likewise, modern card games have moved beyond the standard 52-card deck, into a realm of complexity that blurs the line between a simple card game and a heavier strategy game. Modern games don't even need a board to be considered a board game (which may seem like a misnomer). Strategy, worker placement and Eurogame are just some ways we describe board games. Even though the generic term is ' board games,' modern tabletop games are split into several genres and types.

Seven and seven card game