Category Archives: Card Games

We asked U.S. adults if they’d ever engaged in game design: 31% had, though this was often just adding house rules (15% of all adults). The most widely created new games were, with multiple responses permitted, board games (10%), card games (also 10%), RPGs (6%), video games (5%), mobile games (also 5%), interactive fiction (2%), and gamebooks (also 2%). Younger generations are more likely to create games than older generations: 22% of Gen Z have made their own house rules, compared to just 8% of Baby Boomers; 16% of Gen […]

Back in 2018, I was working on the design of card games intended to be distributed digitally. Players would need to first print out the cards, then cut or otherwise prepare them. As I wanted to understand the largest size deck that PnPers (Print-and-Players) had ever actually printed, I posted a poll on BoardGameGeek. Ironically, I now have responses from 54 PnPers (54 being the size of a standard four-suited deck of cards with two jokers!). I provided choices in increments of 9, since 9-card sheets are very common. The vast majority of PnPers […]

This is an excerpt from the second edition of my ebook, How to Design Card Games. One of the earliest uses of suits in tabletop games comes from the 12th century.  Chinese dominos first had two suits: the Chinese suit and the Barbarian suit (later renamed to the Civil suit and the Military suit, respectively, so as not to disrespect the “barbarians” that had taken over). Unlike modern understandings of suits, these suits were not visually indicated; players simply had to memorize which domino tile belonged to which suit. For […]

From 2016 to 2020, I belonged to a board game group which typically played a new game every week. Meanwhile, my parents still play Scrabble every day, sometimes twice a day. Two very different extremes. My parents are in good company. In a newsmaker survey of 1,059 U.S. adults, 54% of adults would prefer to play a board game that they had played before, while just 16% would prefer to play a board game new to them (20% have no preference, and 10% don’t play board games). While the 16% who prefer […]

Deck hunting is an unsung mechanic that injects anticipation and unpredictability into card games like Go Fish, Fluxx, and Magic: The Gathering. Deck hunting isn’t listed in BoardGameGeek’s index of mechanics; it involves trying to look through a deck to find specific cards. Go Fish is the easiest example. You’re trying to form pairs of cards, and if you can’t, you ask a player if they have a match or draw a card from the deck. In the Fluxx family of card games, you typically win by having two cards […]

House of Danger is a nostalgic updating of the original Choose Your Own Adventure® book as a mainstream card game. Two decks—one with locations, one with items—are divided into five “chapters”, so that you can play the game a chapter at a time over multiple sessions. Another advantage of arranging the deck in chapters is that you don’t have to search through as many cards (ironically, since the books never used chapters). In Choose Your Own Adventure® books, unlike Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and others, all you need to track is […]

According to many surveys I’ve conducted over the years, Uno is the most popular card game in America. For instance, in our recent Nation of Gamers survey, 23% of U.S. adults who had played a card game said the last card game they had played was Uno, outpacing even games that can be played with a standard deck of cards (e.g., Spades, 12%; Solitaire, 9%). I think one overlooked aspect of Uno’s popularity is that it plays well with larger groups, with the publisher saying that it is good for […]

Tl;dr: Seven-card stud, low card in the hole is wild, follow-the-queen is wild, suicide king has to fold, face-up joker means you have to shift your hole cards to the right. Whenever we get together with my brother-in-law and his family, we inevitably play poker. This time, we started with 7-card stud, then played follow-the-queen, then low-card-in-the-hole. At that point, I was ready to fully embrace chaos, and I combined them! I added that if you were dealt the suicide king face up or in the hole, you had to […]

Researchscape conducted a newsmaker survey of 1,074 U.S. adults to develop an overview of game-playing. The survey was fielded from April 22 to 24, 2022. The responses were weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population by the following variables: state and region, gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, ideology, and registered voter status. Videogames have long had niche appeal, but mobile games have democratized the reach of computer games. In fact, mobile games are now played by as many people as card games: 88% of U.S. adults […]

Synopsis: “Double Draw” is a variant of 5-card draw where after the second round of bidding, each remaining player may discard and take up to two additional cards, then bid again. Everyone who wants to play first pays to the pot an agreed-upon ante (typically one or two of the lowest-valued chips). The dealer shuffles and deals each player 5 cards, face down. First betting round – Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, bidding proceeds clockwise. Prior to any bet being placed, initial players can “check”, […]

Diamonds is a plain trick-taking game where ♦ Diamonds are trump, with prediction-based scoring. Players score 10 points for each bid trick that they took and potentially either 1 point for each excess trick (overtrick) or -10 points for each trick that they fell short of their bid (undertrick). Players compete against each other, without partnerships. The Cards and Deal Use a standard deck of 52 cards. For each hand, shuffle and deal the entire deck out, making sure that all players have an equal number of cards. Discard any […]