My Favorite Card Games In 2024
The following is a list of the card games I enjoyed most this year. Not all came out this year, but all were games I found myself going back to over and over throughout the year. There is also no requirement that any of the included games be physical or digital or some may offer both. It's a safe bet that future articles about most of these will be popping up here. I'll provide links to each and some general quick thoughts/descriptions as well but this is far from a comprehensive review of any of these titles. That may come at a later date for at least a few of these though.
- Balatro
I first encountered Balatro during a demo a few months before its release and I remember enjoying it but I don't remember specifics about my first few hands in that demo state. However, once it was released in early 2024, I was pretty sure I was playing something very special. It would have been my pick for Game of the Year at this year's "The Game Awards" had Astro Bot not taken me back to all the joy of childhood.
A phenomenal take on a roguelike deckbuilder that I think manages to draw in players easier than others in the genre for its ability to capitalize on a player's pre-established understanding of traditional Poker hand structures. As I watch my nephew grow into an age where he's really starting to be enamored with video game worlds in much the same way a Crash Bandicoot or Mario 64 defined my childhood, I've been especially conscious lately of finding games that present a player with opposition that is not necessarily combative in nature and Balatro does that wonderfully. I personally think this might be the best card game designed since Magic: The Gathering and I look forward to spending much more time playing it in the coming years (I did buy it on PC, Mobile, PS5, and Switch after all).
- Ascension
Ascension spent most of this year being the game of choice at my table when having game nights with my aunt or when my brother would visit. I've collected almost every physical set, including most of the promo cards. This was the game that re-ignited the collector in me that I'd managed to stifle after lapsing out of the abusive cycle that is content release cadences of major TCGs.
When I wasn't playing Ascension at my kitchen table, I could often be found playing on Steam either through the officially released game or on a Tabletop Simulator mod I spent weeks working on to test out the upcoming Legends expansion with compatibility for every existing expansion as well. It's safe to say I put over 500 hours into playing Ascension just this year.
While I think most folks familiar with this style of deckbuilder might gravitate toward Ascension's predecessor, Dominion, for its lesser variability or toward a more head-on experience like Star Realms, I find Ascension has become my favorite of this bunch for the nice middle ground it finds between the two. I especially enjoy the introduction of the Champion and Dreamscape modules as ways to introduce a bit of asymmetry to the experience.
- Eternal: Chronicles of the Throne
Eternal was one of my favorite TCGs from 2016 through 2019 and my 1900.5 hours of playtime on Steam certainly reflect that. I grew tired of the constant stressors the traditional TCG model places on one's wallet and the instability of the game experience that are driven from the constant need for these types of games to push forward.
As this list is likely to reflect, deckbuilder games have become a strong favorite of mine over the last year or two. I think as I've grown older, I've come to appreciate more bespoke all-in-box experiences of more traditional card game distribution methods much more than the trend chasing and market speculation inherent to a game like Eternal, even if I rather enjoy the world and characters of the latter.
Chronicles of the Throne was a life-saver in this regard. It has that established world and those characters I'd come to like but gone is the ever-present grinding of gold to open packs to get more cards that help me grind more gold. In its place is a rather fantastic take on a Dominion or Ascension-style deckbuilder that I feel handles head-to-head player interaction in a more interesting and engaging way than Star Realms or even Ascension's own sequel, Shards of Infinity.
Where Star Realms or Shards focus on building an attack value alongside your other resources, you were tasked with using that attack to destroy your opponent rather than to take out monsters from the center deck like Ascension. This provides a more direct approach to the concept of player opposition than Ascension, which did have some player interaction but can largely feel like two player's racing for points rather than combating one another. However, the overall idea for each of these two games was that your attack power was just being sent at your opponent directly most of the time. Each game had another card type that could soak some hits (Bases and Heroes, respectively) but these don't necessarily lead to more player interaction in the same way a game of Magic might have captured me once upon a time.
Eternal's take on this was to represent player power through a rather simplified combat flow with units in a way that was very familiar to the TCG player in me and in doing so makes the entire combat flow feel much more interactive. This change to the combat system pushed it over the edge for me when it comes to being my first choice for this more combative take on the genre.
I will say that the Market system introduced in the Gold & Steel expansion really made the whole game feel complete for me and I never play the base game by itself now. Similar to the Dreamscape mechanic found in Ascension, this introduces an additional resource with which players can acquire cards from their own personal second hand of special cards dealt pre-game. In what I feel is an improvement on Ascension's Dreamscape, however, any card acquired from the Market is played on the turn it is acquired. Ascension does this with some cards from their Dreamscape but the majority of them are acquired to the discard pile and I find Eternal's highs feel more fun because my investment is immediately rewarded.
I only picked this game up in late November of this year but it's been the only game that found its way to my table since getting it and I've dedicated time to building a Tabletop Simulator mod for it so I can play with friends online as well.
- Heat: Pedal to the Metal
I got Heat around Christmas 2023 and it's been incredibly fun any time it makes it to the table. I picked up some 3D-printed add-ons to make storage simpler in the box and to add some extra fun bits to the board. I'd not explored that part of the hobby prior to Heat being so thematically tight that I was willing to spend a few bucks for some added components.
Heat is another deckbuilder in this list but its most basic iteration is more deck management than deck building. I find that the experience can vary greatly depending on the modules in use while still feeling familiar throughout.
This game does an awesome job at handling the introduction of additional modules over multiple plays so that nothing feels overwhelming as you continue introducing new mechanics. What starts as a race around the track with some resource management turns into a thrilling multi-race circuit where you're tuning your car by picking up different parts for your deck based on the different boards and changing weather conditions affecting the track. Add in the risk-reward factor of playing more aggressively for sponsorship cards and you're suddenly playing a much more fleshed out game than you started with.
None of that should by any means serve to put down the game in its most vanilla configuration either, as it's a great game to pull out and setup with minimal effort and plenty of strategic depth. The inclusion of the AI racer system helps races with smaller groups still feel robust. I maintain a premium BoardGameArena account simply to play Heat with friends online.
- Paperback
I have had Paperback for a while and it's one I'm always happy to pull out with the right group. Given the nature of being a word game, it's not the best suited for younger players or groups where one person may have a much larger vocabulary. The rulebook suggests a mechanic to lessen this disparity, with the option to credit a player bonus currency if they help someone else make a better play than they'd found on their own but this doesn't offset a large disparity.
I picked up the Deluxe Edition of Paperback through Kickstarter earlier this year (which was great timing since my mom tried the game and liked it so much I gave her my copy) and was impressed with the quality of the components.
I played a lot of Paperback around the same time I was playing the dice-based word game Q-Less from Tom Sturdevant and one thing that stood out to me was the way the two games almost require a different skill set from the player. Having a comprehensive vocabulary will be crucial for each but the composition of the words you might focus on spelling can vary greatly. Where Q-Less naturally guides the player toward words with multiple consecutive consonants due to its lower saturation of vowels and crossword-style building mechanic, Paperback is more freeform. While you're generally looking to make the most comprehensive words you can, there are times where you may be inclined to rack your brain for words that fit a composition that better lines specific letters in your hand in a certain order.
I found the AI in the Steam version to be a bit of a letdown and haven't played it as much as I thought I might through the digital client. However, the roguelike battler take on it, Paperback Adventures, nearly made my list this year as I did spend a fair amount of time on it. I did also create a Tabletop Simulator mod to play with friends.
- Pickup Basketball
This is definitely the lightest game on the list mechanically but the experience is fun nonetheless. I find the translation of mechanics/ideas to different mediums to be of great personal interest to me and I think Pickup's use of dice for a mechanic representing shooting a basketball is a good idea. Rolling a miss has the same satisfying "Wait, that's it?" and "Damn it..." moments of watching a ball hit the rim and bounce out.
I appreciate the tight focus on display here with smaller decks overall vs most of the other deckbuilders on this list and I think doing so lent itself well to establishing the characters. The cast of characters on display here is very diverse and I loved some of the alliterative naming on display with people like Danielle Dimes or Rex Reed.
The general mechanic of using dice rolls to represent successful shot percentages felt like a good way to introduce enough variance into the gameplay to keep games close between players of different skill levels. I did start to notice some trends in the distribution of shot models and I think adding a few more distributions would have lent itself to more variety. However, given that the game was originally created as a way to teach probability and expected value to kids, I think the tighter distributions allow for an easier distinction between a low, medium, and high probability.
After my first few games of Pickup at the table, I decided to scan the card assets so I could create a Tabletop Simulator version to play with friends but I've found that the quick setup and overall fewer components lends itself well to just pulling out of a bag and playing in no time.
- Kodachi
Feudal Japan is a setting I greatly enjoy and Kodachi represents it well with its card art and themes. This is a deckbuilder re-implementation of a game I haven't played yet called Ninjato. While I can't speak much to Ninjato's gameplay, I can say that Kodachi's "press your luck" elements make for some interesting decisions as I sculpt my deck.
The in-game decisions around continuing my turn or stopping it offer some real tension and the inclusion of cards that allow you to switch from needing to play under the target number to playing over it and vice-versa can make for some awesome skill-expressive plays.
I'm not generally a fan of games that make use of multiple central decks but I don't mind Kodachi's use of them. I think having one deck using 2 different card backs to offer an indication of expected difficulty in the next encounter adds some great tension into the decision to press on and opens some strategy where a player may want to try halting on a harder encounter simply to stick their opponent with it instead. This did make me use clear sleeves for this game when I generally would prefer using colored ones to coordinate them with the dividers I use in my multi-purpose game boxes. That's a very minor hangup though and certainly down to my own quirkiness.
The scoring system used here is interesting but a bit obtuse the first couple times you play. Even now with many games under my belt, I find the scoring system to be a bit tedious. Separating my cards out by color as I go to ensure any card of one color that might refer to the count of cards bought in another color can be a tad more fiddly than I like. This scoring system's variability also made my take on its Tabletop Simulator mod the only one I couldn't automate score calculation for easily.
- Ringmaster: Welcome to the Big Top
Ringmaster is a rather chaotic game in a similar vein to Fluxx. I'm a sucker for games making good use of atypical card sizes and these cards give major circus poster energy in a way that really helps reinforce the theme. I tip my hat to the designers who came up with this card layout and the card face graphics in use here.
I'm not generally a fan of games like Ringmaster or Fluxx where the rules are constantly changing and the win condition is discovered during play but I do find Ringmaster to stay reined in a bit tighter in comparison to any version of Fluxx I've ever played. The disparity between the starting and most complex gamestates on offer here isn't nearly the chaotic mess that trying to navigate a web of discard and draw modifiers can be in similar games. I typically find these games to lack a sense of tempo; which I can find jarring.
This one made my favorites list this year not because I'm particularly fond of its gameplay but because I appreciate the way it realizes its visual themes and, most importantly, it's a game my grandparents both enjoy playing and I'm always happy to sit down and join them. It stores very easy and is a breeze to take out and play.
Photo by 3spellcastersandadwarf.com - Golfie
The only purely digital game on this list besides Baltro; Golfie is a chaotic blend of the roguelike deckbuilders I've come to enjoy so much in recent years and the mini golf browser games that got me through computer classes in my childhood all wrapped up in a Mario Party rage inducing multiplayer bow.
The general idea is that your power is tied to cards in your deck, as are the ability to curve your shot and even generate lift on the ball. Clear a hole, get coins, use those coins to buy new cards for your deck. The single player roguelike mode on offer here is a great time in its own right and definitely worth a play.
Where Golfie shines is in the hilarity of its multiplayer offering. Get a group of your best friends together and suddenly the card you bought that lets you build a ramp to jump your ball off can be used in real-time to launch a friend off the map as they take their shot. Laughs are had, names are called, and we're on to the next hole. Sure, you could be nice and use your magnet powerup to pull another player out of a particularly poor landing but wouldn't it be better to instead use it over the hole and just shoot straight for it? Maybe you just want to use your Impact Grenade card on a poor unsuspecting friend... - Altered
This one feels almost more like an "Honorable Mention" since I haven't personally played it. However, I think there's some potentially fantastic things going on in this game that could look to lead the TCG space in a shifting market. It also goes for that "non-combative" conflict that I referred to with Balatro above. I am really coming to appreciate games that find ways to represent an obstacle that isn't met with bashing weapons against one another.
Like I alluded to in the section on Eternal, I am not particularly interested in the traditional TCG model these days. Altered is taking a slightly different approach to this model (there's still the endless pack chase personally keeping me away) with Web3 integration that actually appears to not only lend itself to some interesting gameplay variation but appears to be handled in such a way that engagement with it is entirely optional for the player.
Every card in Altered has a QR code on it that can be scanned to bind that specific card to a player's account. These allow for the creation of entirely unique cards whose authenticity can be verified for tournament play. I think the idea of opening a pack and getting a card that literally no other player in the world can have is the ultimate realization of the feeling I was chasing as a kid buying packs of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic. A player engaging in casual play can just open their packs and play with their cards like any other game. If a player wants to enter into tournament play, they will need to enter with only cards that are actually tied to their accounts. No worrying that someone might be sneaking a fake in against you.
Altered also offers a print replacement service for these cards. Don't worry if your entirely unique one-of-a-kind cards gets left in the pocket of your swim trunks and you jump in the pool (my brother did this one with a Yu-Gi-Oh! deck when we were kids) because you can order a replacement for it, so long as you own the license to that card.
The icing on the cake to all of this might be the ability to transfer digital ownership of a card to another user via the marketplace. I could be a player with no interest in tournament play who pulls a really cool unique. If I'm only ever playing at home with friends anyway, I could sell that unique license to another player who may want it for tourney grinding. They can order the replacement print and I still have my card I pulled from my pack to play with my friends. I could no longer use that card for tournament play, but that might not matter to me.
Through partnership with BoardGameArena, Altered can also be played digitally in such a way that your collection is synced to the online game. This leads to digital play feeling more like local play in terms of optimized decks that can outwardly impact the saturation of playtesting in a game like Magic: The Gathering Arena or other similar digital implementations of physical games.
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