Best card games for 2021

Abacus Spiele

Mamma Mia is a fantastic memory-challenging card game for families. In this easy card game, players take turns throwing ingredients into “the oven” — that is, the pile of cards in the middle of the table — and trying to roughly memorize the order of what’s been contributed. Remembering is important, because players can also opt to play recipe cards, which use previously entered ingredients to cook pizzas (and some of these pizzas require a dozen different ingredients!).

Once the deck is totally played out, everyone flips over the central pile and shuffles through to find which recipes are successfully cooked, and which failed.

This simple game is by turns strategic and chaotic, and always fun for a family game night.

Rio Grande Games

Deck-building is a relatively recent development in card games: essentially, players draft or “buy” cards in a deck building game to shuffle into their draw decks. Slowly, then, the hands they play with each turn transform to allow new strategies over the course of a game. And the granddaddy of these sorts of games: Dominion.

Dominion has been around for years, but its developer has kept it fresh with over a dozen expansions to the base game. 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 problem is, victory point cards (which for the most part do nothing aside from giving you game-winning points) dilute your deck.

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. Of course, if your timing is off by even a single turn, it could lose you the game.

Dominion is a modern classic game, and very much worth your time.

Asmodee

Time Stories is a wonder of a game. With a simple deck of cards, the game catapults you across dimensions and spacetime, guides you through beautifully rendered settings and brings you face-to-face with Lovecraftian monsters — and that’s just in the first campaign.

In Time Stories, players investigate mysteries in settings ranging from ancient Egypt to zombie-infested suburbs. The stories change with your decisions, and your ability to solve the given mystery depends on your cooperation with teammates, your problem-solving skills and your ability to adapt to new elements introduced on the fly by the game.

Time Stories isn’t perfect: you can find plenty of chat boards online with fans debating which stories are best, and which could have been better balanced. But even small unbalances ultimately stem from the game’s massive ambition, and it’s hard not to feel swept up by that ambition every time you sit down to play this fun card game.

David Priest/CNET

Card games can be a blast, but they can also be challenging for visual learners, since so much of the action happens between the cards. Luckily, there are some great game options that mix cards with a central board, and Everdell is one of the best mixed-mechanic games around.

Everdell blends tableau-building mechanics with more traditional meeple placement on a central board. It’s a strategically rich game, but also beautifully endearing as you recruit various woodland critters to live in your settlement using berries, and build structures using wood, stone and resin.

And for the more aesthetically minded, Everdell is one of the more beautifully designed games for 2021.

Renegade Games

Life may currently look a little different from most years thanks to the pandemic, so maybe you’re looking for more two-player games for your smaller family/friend gatherings. If so, The Fox in the Forest is perfect for you: it’s a simple trick-taking game like Rook (or Tichu, from above), with a few special cards mixed into the traditional format.

What makes The Fox in the Forest interesting is the unique card powers and the scoring system. Rather than trying to take all the tricks to win the game, you’re trying to take certain numbers of tricks for certain point values — and if you narrowly miss those ranges, you often miss out on a big bonus.

In many ways, The Fox in the Forest is a fairly traditional, simple game. But it’s a well-balanced game that’s perfect to pick up and play for 20 or 30 minutes.

Asmodee

If you want a little more heft to your two-player card games, try 7 Wonders: Duel, a devious little card-drafting game. Both players attempt to build civilizations across three eras, drafting various cards that help players pursue military or scientific dominance, grow their resources and build various Wonders.

The competitive game moves more quickly than bigger strategy games like Everdell, and the card-drafting mechanism introduces surprising opportunities to block or trap your opponent. If you’re looking for a well-balanced fun game for many play sessions, this is one of the best out there.