As others have alluded to in the thread, teaching people the rules is a barrier. As I looked around for a professionally printed game, I found a game that was very much like Magic the Gathering, but also just a single box of cards called Mindbug.
Turns out it was designed by some folks that brought Richard Garfield in near the end of its design and he ended up having some say in the final product. I've played it a couple of times and each game is only played with a random subset of the cards, so the combinatorics create a lot of replay value.
The card effects are interesting, the illustrations illarious and the interractions a lot of fun.
The twist of the game, the mindbug itself, is a blast of bluffing and gambling that garanties some smiles.
Limited to 2 players but a great small box to have on all occasion of you are into that kind of stuff.
The rules are simple so ir's easy to get in.
The name is stupid though, impossible to search on the web or YouTube (everybody had an "epic" round of some card game), a shame.
https://www.epiccardgame.com/learn
I second Mindbug too. Also Radlands.
and the Install button is "grayed out". That explains why https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Epic%20Card%20Game&c=... from my device only came back with sponsored ads and Hearthstone because they have effectively be delisted from Play -- still available if you have the actual link, but not showing up in search results from the device
You play a hand of up to 5 cards each turn: Adding cards to (concealed) stacked ranks of defending troops, attacking an opponent's ranks, using a card's ability. The suits have different defensive properties when arranged in a rank, and combine in interesting ways; there are also "ultimate" powers players can grab from the center by forming their ranks with particular arrangements of suits, which act as turtle-busters.
Highly recommended, quite fun, probably plays best 1v1. Definitely a lot of small rules to absorb, so it's a more complex beast. But nowhere close to the complexity of Magic.
Link to rules: https://www.regicidegame.com/how-to-play/
I can assure you it's coincidental. I posted about a game I recently discovered and then have been super stoked by people leaving their knowledge of similar games that I'm now also excited to give a go. I've recently got into card games and domino games with the kid (a few board games too) and it's all a blast. One of my favorite aspects of HN (have been on here for about a decade, but occasionally lose my account password and have to start over) is the collective knowledge of curious people who know deep stuff about nearly every topic.
Your opponent has 21 life and you win when your creatures have at least that much power. You can’t attack.
Setup: dealer goes second and starts with 6 cards, opponent starts with 5 cards. Hand limit of 7.
On your turn: Either play 1 card or draw 1 card
Point cards (ace - 10; ace is 1) are creatures with power equal to their point number. Face cards (and sideways 8) are enchantments. No lands or mana costs. "Playing" a card refers to casting that card or channeling that card.
Every point card has “channel - discard this card: Choose a creature with lesser value. Destroy it.” (suit matters, spades > hearts > diamonds > clubs, e.g., 8 of hearts is greater value than 8 of diamonds or any 7 but less than 8 of spades or any 9.) Note that this doesn't target.
Most point cards can be played as sorceries for an alternate effect:
Ace: wrath of God
2: disenchant OR muddle the mixture (this is the only instant and does not count toward your 1 card per turn limit. Everything else is sorcery speed)
3: regrowth
4: mind rot
5: divination
6: tranquility / back to nature
7: mind’s desire
8: sideways as enchantment - glasses of Urza
9: aura extraction*
10: none
Face cards are exclusively enchantments:
Jack: control magic**
Queen: Privileged position***
King: reduce your opponent’s life total based on the number of kings you control for as long as they remain on the battlefield: 0: 21; 1: 14; 2: 10; 3: 7; 4: 5.
Notes: The card types are pretty explicit - muddle the mixture can only counter sorceries or instants, not creatures, enchantments, or channeling. Wrath of god only kills creatures, tranquility only kills enchantments.
Rules can differ, depending on the source:
* sometimes as "reflector mage for enchantments", sometimes as "unsummon for enchantments". **sometimes as "exchange control of target creature". ***sometimes as "all permanents you control have hexproof", I.e., including itself.
I've recently started learning card games that use a standard deck of playing cards and have been pleased with many of them. The advantage over trading card games is that it is MUCH cheaper and takes up a lot less space and it doesn't feel like I'm chasing an impossible goal.
I noticed he had a couple of packs of playing cards on his coffee table and upon closer inspection, I realized that each card in Uno maps to a card in 52 card deck. A standard Uno deck has 108 cards, which is a standard 52-card deck plus the jokers.
So we played Uno with his two decks of playing cards.
Would not be surprised if there is a version of this game everywhere decks of cards are available
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/191552/vassal
It is not the first such variant, but one that I felt a bit more pleased with than the other variants I found.
Overall I didn't find a lot that I liked, particularly in the two-player space. Everything seemed to be either Rummy-family games around set collecting, or trick-taking games that might as well have been Hearts or Euchre.
All that to say, if you've got a few favourites, please recommend!
Haggis, Greasy Spoon, Crisps, Dickory, Vidrasso, Cupid: Tricks and Tactics, Tuhao.
New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia
Two of the books I'd take to prison.
(Supposedly linked from that site somewhere, but I got it from the reddit thread linked elsewhere here.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20100107192618/http://airship.ho...
Four kinds of cards in 1-2 stacks? 10-13 cards of each kind? 2-4 special cards that are identical? Hmm, I wonder how this game was invented…
I do wish we would get back to games that were just played with a deck of cards though. More options for bored people at small gatherings.
Taylor's Trick Taking Table is a YouTube channel dedicated to them. The Portland Game Collective's Discord channel is the de facto English language home to the movement.
Most of them are very small scale and artisanal but a few bigger publishers have also started doing more of them in the past year.
The Tokyo Game Market has literally hundreds of new ones released every year but most don't have English and can only be bought in Japan.
A few smaller companies like Tricky Imports and Newmill Games are importing them, though.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DB2YF46s0oVFUSIpR9vxoGIbhpT... [2] https://www.sideroomgames.com/product/for-northwood/ [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2946002/wip-kni54ts-a-solo-...
We took a pair of normal card decks, mapped some basic decks to the cards, and we did play. Good times.
Unless you're willing to write on the cards of course.
Not something we ever did on the regular, but it was fun.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/17cb47k/cuttle_...
Magic's direct inspiration was Cosmic Encounter.
Back around 2015 I was shocked that there wasn’t a place to play online. It’s the kind of game where the appeal is immediate if you’re into this sort of thing. I was like, where the hell has this game been all my life? How had I grown up playing card games and never known about this gem?
So I did what anyone would do: I learned web development to create a site for playing Cuttle online: https://cuttle.cards
I’ve made it my mission to make it so anyone can play Cuttle anytime they want. We still have some growing to do in order to reach that point, but we have a vibrant community with weekly play sessions, a ranked leaderboard, and 5 invitational championship tournaments every year. Check it out!
Some resources for anyone who’d like to learn more: We have open play sessions on the site every Wednesday at 8:30pm EST and every Thursday at 12pm EST. Beginners are always welcome and it’s the best time to find games.
We have an active discord (https://discord.gg/tPWm6kpbmb) where you can chat with other players, find games, and dive into strategy.
Here is a printable cheat sheet you can use to make learning (and teaching) the rules easier: https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf
We also live stream the Cuttle tournaments on twitch: https://twitch.tv/cuttle_cards
And then upload the VODs to YouTube: https://youtube.com/@cuttle-cards2245?si=lHbXNsQX54KjLtxk
Lastly as someone else mentioned, the whole project is open source, so if you’re interested in the technical side of things, you can check out the repo here: https://github.com/cuttle-cards/cuttle
It’s very much under active development and we’re always happy to work with new contributors, so if you’re interested in contributing to a full stack pvp card game, I’ve got just the thing for you. The app is a nodejs backend built with the sailsjs backend framework and a Vue 3 SPA frontend. We use cypress for e2e testing and vitest for unit testing. The test setup is something I’m particularly proud of and I’ve found the card game context to be an enormously fruitful one for testing automation since it saves so much time developing for multi user flows.
All that is to say that Cuttle is a blast and that if playing the game or contributing to the open source application interests you, I’d be happy to answer any questions about either. I hope y’all enjoy!
This game seems super interesting so I'll be adding it to my ever growing collection of standard card deck games.
Thank you!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rRIiRebARNIadQaMZgimKYvW...
I guess this is why play testing when creating new games can take a long time - both for enjoyment and fairness.
EDIT: ah, was confused by the cheat sheet on cuttle.cards (https://www.cuttle.cards/img/cuttle_rules.pdf). The main page mentions the mutual-Queen-protection as a variant, which I guess cuttle.cards has adopted.
I had success getting friends to play games like Codenames, Fauna, Mountains of Madness, and Mysterium. There's a website called BoardGameGeek that gives each game a "weight" rating signifying how complex it is. Anything under 2/5 complexity should be easy enough for anybody.
Rules are very simple, yet the strategy is deeper. You essentially want to get 3 property sets, but there are all kinds of action cards that allow you to steal properties or sets, negate actions, charge people rent money...etc. Nobody gets upset either as a typical game takes like 10-20 minutes. You can play like 2-6 players iirc.
First, if at all possible, teach only one person at a time. Teaching multiple people a new game all at once is incredibly difficult for everyone.
Second, they need to understand the basic turn structure or play pattern if the game has one. If you can, print it out and use it as a play-aid.
Third, play several games open-handed with pre-constructed decks. Do not introduce the deckbuilding aspects of the game right away. Make the decks simple and basic. Ideally, create one deck for each "faction" in the game.
In Magic, Wizards made 30-card beginning decks in each of the five colors that were meant for teaching the game. This was 15 years ago or more; I doubt they still do it since Arena exists. They were all common, so nothing complicated. They were like... $10 a set or something. So you'd do the above and play a couple of games with different colors and let the new player find one they like. Then, once they feel experienced and played a game close-handed or with only one of us playing close-handed, I'd ask them which two decks they liked the best, and I'd pick two others. Then we'd each shuffle the two chosen decks together and play again. And watching a person's mind expand into what the game really was during that game was incredibly satisfying. Ideally, at the end, I'd just give them all five decks to keep.
Interesting observation! I haven't had this experience at all. I've taught lots of board games to people, usually to multiple at once. The thing I find tricky is when you have some people who have played before and they keep interjecting with details that either aren't relevant yet, or I was planning to mention at a better time in the explanation.
A group of all newbs is much easier.
Otherwise, yeah I think teaching board games to a group is not that much harder. Or playing card games for that matter.
You might teach someone how to play Hearts which is pretty rules light. But once they understand that, other trick taking games already have a head start.
Another approach is to start with something where the rules are things on the cards so you learn them as you go. Sushi Go would be a good example of something like this and pretty approachable to start out.
Another good suggestion is something like No Thanks! Over time, people start to see that a new game doesn't have to be onerous. Slowly learning concepts like drafting and discards and tricks and whatever, makes it easy to introduce further games because it becomes "This is just like Game X but with new rule Y."
My poor partner will have these inflicted upon her.
MTG strategy relies on mana advantage, card advantage, card selection advantage, card efficiency advantage (aka pay WotC more), and tempo advantage.
Cuttle doesn't have casting resources to manage. It has little card efficiency advantage. Tempo advantage is mostly linked to the mana curve and mostly doesn't exist. Card selection doesn't exist outside of getting a card from the graveyard or seeing an extra card. Card advantage exists, but mostly doesn't matter because you can't capitalize on the cards you draw. Even worse, the terribly unfun card disadvantage exists in the form of a discard effect.
That being said, I do have a few standbys:
Bullshit's a favorite for semi-large groups: https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html
Egyptian Ratscrew is my pick for 3-5 players (although I'd caution it against playing it in quiet public spaces): https://waste.org/~oliviax/cards/ratscrew.html
Lastly, Duel 52 is a recent favorite for just my wife and I to play, and very much in the vein of Cuttle: http://juddmadden.com/duel52/
You could also use mnemonics to remember effects, I've come up with these:
2 - Two blue (counterspell cost in Magic)
3 - Three Wishes (wish for a card from stockpile)
4 - _ (possible connection: 4 is "Death" number in China and Japan)
5 - Dig for more cards (with your 5-finger hand)
6 - Six sweeps the tricks (thanks to ChatGPT for this one)
7 - Lucky Draw
8 - Pair of Glasses
9 - Lasso (you bind opponents card for a turn)
10 - Highest points (no effect, should be easy to remember)
J - jump (sudden assault)
Q - Mom steps forward to protect her kids
K - One king's on scene, you need fourteen. If two kings defend, make it ten. With three kings on the rise, try seven to prize. When all kings alive, you just need five. (thanks to Claude for 1, 2 and 4 kings)
Ace - Ace clears the spaceI was recently taught a card game, and when I searched for it I could not find it anywhere. Now I can probably find it.
For creating SVG files for CNC cutting.
I dabbled with it when it was posted here some time ago, definitely much easier to use for its intended purpose than a fully featured app like Inkscape etc.
I believe he frequents these parts.