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Best card games 2024: our top choices for adults

We list the best card games to play in 2024, from classic trading card games like Magic: The Gathering to modern stars like Scout and Coup.

Best card games guide - header image showing box art for the card games Scout, Coup, and Fox in the Forest

Looking for the best card games to play right now? Good news: we’ve tested loads of them to bring you the very best choices in every genre – from snappy 15-minute party games to deep, strategic trading card games. In choosing the best titles, we’ve considered speed and ease of play, tactical depth, compelling themes, and more – so whatever you fancy for your next game night, there’s something to fit the bill here!

These are all distinctive, brand-name card games you can buy from a store. For games with a regular 52-card deck, check out our list of the best playing card games. Or, for a chunkier tabletop experience, try our guide to the best board games.

Why you can trust us ✔ We spend hours testing games, toys, and services. Our advice is honest and unbiased to help you buy the best. Find out how we test.

Scout

The best card game for adults overall.

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Scout specifications:
Publisher Oink Games
Game length 20 minutes
Player count 2-5
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Unique, innovative rules
  • Perfectly balanced gameplay
  • Gorgeous, colorful design
Reasons to avoid
  • Tough to explain to kids
  • Poor use of its theme

At first glance, Scout is an easy set-building game, similar to classics like Rummy or Whist. However, Oink Games’ innovations give this familiar gameplay an incredibly unique twist. Scout has scooped a bunch of awards and nominations since releasing in 2021, and we think it deserves every single one.

Each round, players are looking to collect and play (or ‘Show’) sets of cards with matching numbers or sequential runs. Matching sets always beat sequential runs with the same or fewer cards, and high-value sequences beat low-value ones.

The challenge comes from the fact that, when you first receive your opening hand, you can’t rearrange the order of the cards you were dealt. Your only choice is which way up you’ll play your hand – as both ends have different sets of numbers.

To up the stakes, the set you play must always be more valuable than the one played previously, so sometimes you’ll need to ‘Scout’ cards already played by an opponent – netting you a card that could complete a crucial sequence in your hand, but rewarding another player with a victory point in exchange. The first player to empty their hand or play an unbeatable set ends the round, and they usually take home the most victory points.

Hidden behind its simple premise is a game of careful decision-making. There’s enough strategy and push-your-luck tension packed into this tiny box to fill a whole night of fiendish gaming, but Scout sits at a supremely replayable runtime of just 15 to 30 minutes.

Love Letter

The best quick card game.

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Love Letter specifications:
Publisher Z-MAN Games / Asmodee
Game length 20 minutes
Player count 2-6
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Easy to teach
  • Rapid, moreish gameplay
  • Lovely drawstring bag
Reasons to avoid
  • Lacks replayability
  • Flimsy cards

The best card games don’t need to have a weighty deck packed with countless different options to provide a good time. In fact, Love Letter proves that they only need 16. That’s all that’s inside this uber-light, uber-fun classic, which is ideal for the tabletop gamer on a budget (or who’s running low on cupboard room).

Love Letter has a charming premise. The players are each suitors, trying to send letters to a princess by selecting the right court member as courier, while intercepting their rivals’ wooing efforts.

This translates to a fast-paced game of canny social deduction, where you must figure out which cards your opponents have in their possession, and eliminate them using your own.

Simple to teach and dead easy to jump into, Love Letter makes for a brilliant warmup game. Also, because rounds are so short and cards move around so quickly, you’re never holding the same hidden hand for long, making this that rare thing: a social deduction game that’s still enjoyable for the virtuous among us with no fibbing skills.

The Fox in the Forest

The best trick taking card game

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The Fox in the Forest specifications:
Publisher Renegade Game Studios
Game length 30 minutes
Player count 2
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Simple but engaging
  • Dreamy fantasy art style
  • Intriguing scoring method
Reasons to avoid
  • Unintuitive ‘play to lose’ mechanic
  • Lacks theme

A trick-taking two player card game, The Fox in the Forest has a lovely fairy tale theme and adorable artwork – the cutesiness perhaps belying the meaty, satisfying puzzle that lies within.

A game of The Fox in the Forest is played across 13 tricks. In each of these, the leading player will lay a card. The following player must then play a card of the same suit, if they can, and any card from their hand if they cannot. The player with the highest card in the leading suit, or the highest card in the trump suit, determined at the start of the game, wins the trick. The winner then becomes (or remains) the leading player for the next trick.

It’s all about when to expend resources, then, as you want to win tricks by as little as possible, saving your best cards (many of which have special functions) for when you really need them. One very clever rule transforms the experience from enjoyable to exceptional: the scoring mechanism.

You see, you want to win as many tricks as possible, but if you triumph in 10 or more of the 13, you are punished for your greed and don’t win any points. That means at any time, your opponent might switch from trying to best you to trying to throw away winning tricks in spectacular fashion. It adds a whole new layer of sneaky tactics to an already pretty fiendish little game.

Magic: The Gathering

The best trading card game.

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Magic: The Gathering specifications:
Publisher Wizards of the Coast
Game length 15 – 120+ minutes, depending on format
Player count 2-6 (more and things get confusing)
Complexity 4/5
Reasons to buy
  • Endless strategic variety
  • Compelling lore and art
  • Superb free digital version
Reasons to avoid
  • Collecting can be expensive
  • High skill ceiling for newbies
  • Very complex advanced rules

The distinguished paterfamilias of trading card games, Magic: The Gathering sits near the head of the table here for good reason. Simple to learn, but unfathomably difficult to master, Magic is a game with history behind it, one that can be appreciated as much for its beautiful artwork and interesting storytelling as for its tight gameplay and challenging deckbuilding.

The great thing about MTG is the sheer variety of experiences it has to offer, from the constantly shifting MTG Standard meta to MTG Commander‘s exciting, over-the-top turns.

From lean, mean aggro decks; to infuriating, opponent-stymying control decks; to absurd jank decks that only come together 10% of the time, but when they do are things of beauty; Magic’s a fount of diverse experiences.

Yet despite all these options, the most popular way to play is still ‘kitchen table’ Magic – just duking it out with your friends using whatever cards you happen to own – and that’s heaps of fun too. Check out the MTG release schedule for more Magic news.

Coup

The best social deduction card game.

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Coup specifications:
Publisher Indie Boards & Cards
Game length 15 minutes
Player count 2-6
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Addictive bluffing game
  • Easy yet engaging rules
  • Iconic art
Reasons to avoid
  • Social gameplay isn’t for everyone
  • A bit too expensive

Like all great social deduction games, Coup is a delightful ballet of secrets and lies, where the cards you have are far less important than the cards you claim to have. In each game, you’re dealt two cards in secret, each showing a particular member of a backstabbing royal court in a futuristic dictatorship.

Every card also has a unique, advantageous ability – or the power to block opponents from using their own abilities. Someone else may claim to have the Assassin, who gives them the power to remove another player’s card from the game. But what if their target says they have a Contessa, who blocks assassination attempts? This is the crux of Coup’s risky, intoxicating bluffing game.

Any time a claim about a card is made, another player can challenge it. The player who made the claim must prove they had the card they originally said. If they can, their challenger must lose one of their precious cards. If their lie is revealed, they’re the one who loses a card. The winner is the last person standing with at least one card, so these are a precious resource to gamble with.

There are three copies of each character in the 15-card deck, so you can use probability to try and sniff out a liar. However, in many cases, you’ll have to go on a hunch. Once you and your pals learn the dance and get a feel for the back and forth of each card’s special abilities, Coup can move very quickly – but it’s never about the cards; it’s all about staring your opponents in the eye, and daring them to take a chance.

Monikers

The best party card game for adults.

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Monikers specifications:
Publisher CMYK
Game length 30-60 minutes
Player count 4-16+
Complexity 1/5
Reasons to buy
  • Fast-paced and hilarious
  • Easy to learn
  • Quality components
Reasons to avoid
  • Expensive for what it is

Monikers is based on a folk game so old that no one knows where it came from. It might have been invented by a particularly enterprising velociraptor, who can say? And listen, as I explain the premise, it’s going to sound an itty bit like Charades, but trust me, with the right group of people, Monikers is a riot.

In Monikers, players take turns describing a series of characters to their team. In the first round, clue-givers can say anything they want, except the character’s name. In the second round, they can only utter one word (or noise) for each character, and in the third, they can only mime. Cards range from the mundane (Bob Ross, Marie Antoinette) to the seriously outlandish (Doge, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or just ‘Nobody’).

Sounding like an impossible challenge so far? Well, it kind of is. The frustration is half the fun, but the other half comes from the fact that the same deck is used across each of the three rounds, meaning in-jokes form and your group develops a kind of – very silly – shared language. A party game with a higher hit rate than most, if your goal is goofy entertainment, there’s no better funny card game for adults than Monikers.

Dominion

The best non-TCG deck building game.

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Dominion specifications:
Publisher Rio Grande Games
Game length 30 minutes
Player count 2-4 (up to 6 with expansions)
Complexity 3/5
Reasons to buy
  • Varied strategic gameplay
  • Plenty of quality expansions
Reasons to avoid
  • Theme feels old-fashioned
  • Expansions can be expensive

If you’re attracted to the strategic flavour of collectible trading card games, but don’t fancy blowing hundreds of bucks on extra decks and randomized booster packs, the deck building games genre is perfect for you – and the 2008 classic Dominion sits right at the top of the pile.

In this medieval themed card game, you and your rivals will all start with identical, small decks of weak cards – then take turns drawing and playing cards from a central supply to grow, improve, and refine your deck; rack up victory points; and screw over the other players.

That big, central pool of cards contains a whole circus of tricks and treats you’ll need to plot a strategic course between. Some cards straight-up give you victory points; some generate ‘coins’ you can spend on buying new, better cards; some attack your enemies; some let you react to your enemies attacking you; and so on. Your choices compound, and your chosen deck-building path might outpace your enemies or leave you in their dust.

There’s plenty of strategic deliciousness to be had just from the core box, but, once you feel you’ve seen what it has to offer, there are no fewer than 15 Dominion expansions on offer, each packed with extra cards that add brand new game features, as well as their own distinct themes.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet 9

The best co-op card game for adults

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The Crew: The Quest for Planet 9 specifications:
Publisher Kosmos
Game length 20 minutes
Player count 2-4
Complexity 3/5
Reasons to buy
  • Intense coop play
  • Good value for money
Reasons to avoid
  • You need to play in silence
  • Difficulty is high and ramps up fast

Another trick-taking game, but this time cooperative – in The Crew: The Quest for Planet 9, players are astronauts on a mission to the final frontier. To succeed, they’ll need to ensure the right players win the right cards in order to complete individually assigned tasks.

But, uh-oh, a complication! There’s a cosmic communication jam caused by space dust or angry Martians or something, which means you have to play in silence, or at least not discuss strategy. You can only describe your hand to your companions with the help of radio tokens, which indicate whether a card you’ve laid is the highest, lowest or only card of its suit that you’re holding.

That means you really have to pay close attention and get into a shared headspace to figure out what each other’s clues mean. It’s easy to go wrong, but, as with another silent board game, Mysterium, misunderstandings are usually funny. You can always yell at your bumbling teammates once the game is complete.

In terms of bang for your buck, the Crew certainly delivers. Packed in its compact box you’ll find 50 scenarios, allowing you to change the game up each time, and face increasingly nightmarish missions. Good job we can’t hear you scream up there!

Summoner Wars

The best non-collectible strategy card game.

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Summoner Wars specifications:
Publisher Plaid Hat Games / Asmodee
Game length 40-60 minutes
Player count 2
Complexity 3/5
Reasons to buy
  • Excellent expansions
  • Accessible but rich strategy
Reasons to avoid
  • Divisive, cartoony art style
  • Can be quite luck-based

The best strategic card game to play if you’re not into the whole collecting thing and just want everything to come in one box, Summoner Wars, originally released in 2009, was conjured again this year as a second edition, replete with new art, updated rules, and brand new factions to lead into battle.

Whereas, in most combat-focused card games, the fight takes place in an undefined space, in Summoner Wars the battlefield is a board you can slide cards around on. That shakes things up significantly. Structures can be built on your side of the field and creatures can, and often do, get in each other’s way. It’s more turn-based tactics game than standard strategy card or strategy board game.

Another twist is that, instead of your player avatar being a defenceless pile of hit points squatting behind its mates like a big chicken, the summoners in charge of these wars are unafraid to get stuck in and bash some heads. This adds a nice bit of tension – you want to make use of your summoner and also keep them out of harm’s way.

But where Summoner Wars really shines is its asymmetrical factions, from the boost-based Savannah Elves, to the construct-building Polar Dwarves. Each one has its own distinctive playstyle, and with six in the Master Set alone, there are endless memorable matchups to try out.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

The best story driven card game.

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Arkham Horror: The Card Game specifications:
Publisher Fantasy Flight Games
Game length 1-2 hours
Player count 1-2
Complexity 3/5
Reasons to buy
  • Immersive writing
  • Fantastic artwork
Reasons to avoid
  • Difficult to navigate locations
  • Fiddly setup can cause spoilers
  • Expensive to add expansions

In Arkham Horror: The Card Game – one of our all time favorite Cthulhu board games – you play a group of mystery-solving paranormal investigators, finding clues and then figuring out how to deal when those clues sprout tentacles and spiky teeth.

Full of co-op – or, optionally, single player – campaigns, it’s genuinely impressive how well Arkham Horror manages to create that big campaign experience (obviously somewhat condensed) using just a few decks of cards.

Tweaking the decks that determine your investigators’ powers, equipment and even their fatal flaws is highly rewarding, and the narratives, though linear, are strongly thematic – with some good twists, turns, and touch choices.

There are plenty of adventures to be found in the base game and loads more available as expansions – as well as new investigators to try out. If you’re a fan of Lovecraftian spookiness and you haven’t mined this particular seam of hobbyist fun yet, it’s well worth giving it a go!

Cockroach Poker

The best pure bluffing card game.

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Cockroach Poker specifications:
Publisher Drei Magier Spiele
Game length 20 minutes
Player count 2-6
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Simple yet elegant gameplay
  • Extremely funny
Reasons to avoid
  • Slightly ‘yucky’ art style
  • Not fun for bad liars

There’s no better lie than a shared lie, that’s what they say… Or is it? Perhaps we made that up. Anyway, it’s definitely true that vermin-themed bluffing card game Cockroach Poker (a.k.a. Kakerlaken-Poker in the original German) is stupendous fun. Scout’s honour!

Cockroach Poker is all about handing your mate an animal and, with great audacity, declaring it to be something it isn’t. So you might say a cockroach is a rat, for instance. They can then either make a call on whether you’re lying or not, or pass the card on to the next player.

If they opt for the latter, they look at the card, and then pass it on, either agreeing with your claim (“Yes, that’s one whiskery rat all right”) or coming up with a new one, which just like your own, could be true or false (“Actually, it’s a bat!”).

So, you might end up passing a card all the way down the line, until the last player is forced to untangle this web of utter twaddle and settle the matter of what the damn card truly is once and for all. At which point everyone else, who already knew the answer, collapses in a fit of giggles. It’s absurd, but it’s also absurdly enjoyable.

Jaipur

The best push-your-luck card game.

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Jaipur specifications:
Publisher Space Cowboys / Asmodee
Game length 30 minutes
Player count 2
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Simple to learn, fast to play
  • Brilliant risk/reward moments
  • Cheap and good-looking
Reasons to avoid
  • High randomness
  • Resetting between rounds gets dull

In Jaipur, players are Indian merchants, trading the finest spices, cloth, gold and camels, all in a tug-of-war to become the wealthiest. On your turn you’ve got just two types of moves to consider: you can buy wares, or you can sell them.

While bonuses are awarded for selling goods in large quantities, each type of good decreases in value as the market becomes flooded. That means there’s a fine balance to strike between selling early and waiting till you have more to sell.

You can also buy all the camel cards in one go, which reveals new, valuable resources your foe can snatch up, but gives you greater purchasing power, as you can trade these even-toed ungulates in later for whatever’s sitting on the shelves.

Jaipur is a game of risk taking, knowing when to push your luck. It’s a great two-player card game because you soon realize that following your opponent’s moves is more important than planning out your own. You’ve got to get a read on what they’re collecting, how much of it they’re likely to have, and the size of their camel fleet. And then you can create a plan of action for screwing them over.

As economic card games go, Jaipur is simple but effective. It’s a quick and easy card game to jump into, and incredibly moreish.

Read our Jaipur review.

Exploding Kittens

The best casual card game for silly fun-times.

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Exploding Kittens specifications:
Publisher Exploding Kittens
Game length 15 minutes
Player count 2-5
Complexity 1/5
Reasons to buy
  • Simple to learn and play
  • Fun, tense gameplay
  • Jokey, memey art style
Reasons to avoid
  • Simple rules can grow dull
  • Very random chance driven
  • Zero competitive balance

Ever wished Russian Roulette was a little more family friendly? Alright, maybe Exploding Kittens is still a pretty grim mental picture – but at least it’s the kittens exploding, not you. The brainchild of Matthew Inman, creator of webcomic The Oatmeal, this bestselling card game is a direct translation of the comic’s irreverent humor; but it’s still cracking fun even if the jokes aren’t your cup of tea.

Play is simple. Take turns drawing cards, and the first person to draw an exploding kitten is out. The winner is the last survivor, the one person who managed to avoid encountering spontaneous feline combustion.

Of course, there will be plenty of opportunities to push probability in your favour (or screw an opponent over). Other cards in the deck allow you to check what cards are coming up, force other players to draw cards, or even shuffle the deck entirely – so no one knows where the next exploding kitten will come from.

Exploding Kittens may sound a bit simple, but the tension as the deck slowly depletes – and the chance of an exploding kitten grows – will leave you breathless. This is one of the biggest-selling board game Kickstarters ever, and the millions of people who’ve picked up a copy can tell you it’s a worthy buy.

Air Land & Sea

The best war card game

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Air Land & Sea specifications:
Publisher Arcane Wonders
Game length 20 minutes
Player count 2
Complexity 2/5
Reasons to buy
  • Quick, tense, and unpredictable
  • Plenty of strategic variety
Reasons to avoid
  • Newbies will struggle against veterans
  • Feels simplistic next to war board games

With just a handful of cards and very few rules, Air Land & Sea reliably produces nail-biting games, and it plays so quickly it’s incredibly easy to fit in another game – or more. It’s themed around World War Two (though a cartoony ‘Critters at War’ variant is available if you prefer). Three ‘theatre’ cards laid out between the players represent the battles for Air, Land, and Sea.

Both players will draw a hand of cards from a shared deck, representing your forces. Each card has a strength score from one to six showing how much it contributes to a battle. You can only deploy each card in one type of theater – there’s no way to get your Aircraft Carriers into the battle for the skies – but you can play any card face down into any theater, where it counts as strength two.

You’re fighting to control two out of three battles by having the highest score there at the end of the round, a bit like Marvel Snap. And just like Marvel Snap, your cards have extra powers. They might flip over one of your face-down cards, blow something up, call in reinforcements from the deck, or let you deploy your next unit anywhere. The fact you share the deck with your opponent means you’ll have some idea what they’ve got in their hand, but you never know.

But the best twist is in the scoring system. If you think a round’s going against you, you can choose to retreat. You’ll surrender some points to your opponent, but the sooner you retreat, the less your opponent gets. When should you fold? When do you need to go all in? Can you bait your opponent into the trap you’ve set?

Joking Hazard

The best comedy card game

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Joking Hazard specifications:
Publisher Cyanide & Happiness
Game length 30-90 minutes
Player count 3-10
Complexity 1/5
Reasons to buy
  • Cards Against Humanity, but better
  • Tons of silly, rude webcomic art
Reasons to avoid
  • Still relies on crass shock humor
  • Perhaps a bit overpriced

We don’t mean to bag on Cards Against Humanity too much – it was a lot of fun in its day. But we mean it when we say Joking Hazard, from the makers of the Cyanide and Humanity webcomic, is essentially the same experience, only funnier and better.

If you’re thinking we prefer it because we got too squeamish or overly ‘woke’ about CAH’s signature, anti-political correctness shock humor, you’re quite wrong. No, shock humor is a wonderful thing in small doses, and Joking Hazard packs in just as much as CAH ever did. Where this game gets the edge is by doing the same simple, dirty, funny thing – but in a significantly more interesting, creative way.

Where CAH had players select text-only responses to a shared prompt on a single white card, Joking Hazard creates a three-panel comic strip by selecting panels one and two at random from a pool of 350 cards, then having players propose alternate endings to the strip by playing cards from their hand.

At a stroke, this design gives Joking Hazard an extra dimension – pictures – that CAH never had, helping to create more variety between rounds and games by telling a different dumbass story each time. High art it ain’t – but if you and your pals like CAH but have got a bit bored of it, we can heartily recommend this as an alternative.

If you’re looking for the other kind of ‘adult’ games – you should definitely read our guides to the best sex board games and sex card games.

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