The 6 Best Card Games of 2025

9 Lives is a trick-taking game where the winner of each trick gets to add an already-played card back into their hand. It’s a simple, interesting twist on standard trick-taking games, but we preferred Cat in the Box’s take on the genre.

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 guide.

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.

Cover Your Assets is a highly luck-based hand-management game that has a simple game loop: You play sets of cards to a pile in front of you, but if any other player has a card from that set, they can steal your pile of points right out from under you. The rules are easy to learn, and it’s fun to stick it to your opponents, but on the whole we found the gameplay to be too simple and repetitive compared to our picks.

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.

Forest Shuffle is a tableau-builder about constructing a thriving forest ecosystem. Much like Race for the Galaxy, it does a lot with just a deck of cards, and the double-sided nature of many cards gives players lots of choice in how they strategize. However, we found that gameplay was a bit too complicated for its own good, and the info-dense cards tended to overwhelm new players.

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.

Ghosts of Christmas is another trick-taking game, this time with the twist that you play three different tricks at once — representing the past, present, and future. It’s a cool take on the genre, and fun to play, but we still prefer our pick.

Haggis is a ladder-climbing game with lovely stained glass-themed art and some fun bidding mechanics. It works well with two players and plays even better with three, but we think Scout is a more enjoyable take on the same basic idea.

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.

Queen by Midnight is a deck-building battler similar to Mistborn. It has incredible art and production value, but we preferred Mistborn’s gameplay. The beautiful production also means the game is both expensive and takes up a ton of space on a game shelf.

Resist! is a solo card-placement game that puts the player in the role of the Spanish Marquis after the Spanish Civil War. Players play cards that represent Marquis agents, sending them on missions to defeat associated enemy cards. Agent cards can be played in a weaker concealed condition (meaning they get shuffled back into the deck after the round) or a more powerful revealed condition (which takes that card out of the game). It’s a tricky puzzle, as players balance the need to win immediate missions against long-term deck management. The subject matter is affecting, too, but we found gameplay a bit too difficult (almost discouragingly so) to recommend to most people.

Sea, Salt, and Paper is a hand management and set collection game with distinctive artwork and a peppy pace. It takes a few rounds to understand what the cards mean and how they interact, which is a little annoying since it’s the point of the game. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a quick and breezy game to pass the time, but we found it too simple to recommend.

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.

Skull King is a modified version of the classic trick-taking game Oh Hell, with a few added twists. Each turn, players get a number of cards equal to the round number, make bids as to how many tricks they think they’ll win, and then play the round. In addition to the normal tick-taking rules, there are specialty cards that add extra trump options and an escape card that forfeits a trick. It’s a fun evolution of a classic, but we think Cat in the Box is a more interesting take of the same genre, making it a better option.

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.

Tournament at Avalon is a sprawling and ambitious trick-taking game that gives each player different powers and involves special items that can be used in tricks, all of which leads to quite a convoluted rule book. That could be great news for folks who are experienced at this kind of game and are hungry for more complexity, but beginners will likely struggle. And in our experience, it tends to take longer than the advertised 45-minute playtime, which can make it feel like a bit of a slog.

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.

The Vale of Eternity is a hand-management drafting game where players are tasked with building a stable of mythical creatures. Each round, players draft cards from a shared market and use abilities granted by the cards they’ve drafted. The gameplay leads to satisfying interactions between players, and it’s a thrill to build powerful points-generating engines with various card combinations, but in our playtests the game ran out of steam near the end.

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.