Card
Games
of 2026

Flip over cards one by one without flipping the same number twice.

Sound easy? Think again! This isn’t just any deck of cards… In Flip 7 there’s only one 1 card, two 2’s, three 3’s, etc plus a bunch of special cards that can score you extra points, give you a second chance, or freeze you or your opponents in your tracks.

Are you the type of player to play it safe and bank points before you bust, or are you going to risk it all and go for the bonus points by flipping over seven in a row? Press your luck meets strategy in this addictive card game that’s sure to be the greatest card game you’ve ever played!

Hanabi, named for the Japanese word for “fireworks,” is a cooperative game in which players try to create the perfect fireworks show by placing the cards on the table in the right order. (In Japanese, hanabi is written as 花火; these are the ideograms flower and fire, respectively.)

The card deck consists of five different colors of cards, numbered 1–5 in each color. For each color, the players try to place a row in the correct order from 1–5. Sounds easy, right? Well, not quite, as in this game you hold your cards so that they’re visible only to other players. To assist other players in playing a card, you must give them hints regarding the numbers or the colors of their cards. Players must act as a team to avoid errors and to finish the fireworks display before they run out of cards.

Star Realms is a spaceship combat deck-building game by Magic Hall of Famers Darwin Kastle and Rob Dougherty. It combines the fun of a deck-building game with the speed and interactivity of Trading Card Game-style combat. In Star Realms, players make use of Ships and Bases to generate Trade to acquire new Ships and Bases or to generate Combat to attack their opponent to reduce their Authority or destroy their Bases. When you reduce your opponent’s Authority to zero, you win!

The Ships and Bases in Star Realms come in four factions. You may acquire and use cards of any faction, but many cards have powerful Ally abilities that reward you for using cards of the same faction together. As you acquire cards using Trade, you put them into your discard pile to be later shuffled into your personal deck. When you play a Ship, you do what it says and then place it into your discard pile at the end of your turn. When you play a Base, you place it face up in front of you and may use its abilities once every turn. In addition to Combat being the way you reduce your opponent’s Authority to zero and win the game, it’s also useful for destroying your opponent’s Bases. Some Bases are designated as Outposts. Your opponent’s Outposts must be destroyed before you can use Combat to attack your opponent’s Authority directly.

Point Salad is a fast and fun card-drafting game for the whole family. There are over 100 ways to score points. Players may use a variety of strategies, and every game of Point Salad is unique!

Cards come in six different types of veggies, and the back of each card has a different scoring method. So, for instance, one scoring method may award 2 points for every carrot you have, but deduct a point for every onion. By drafting combinations of veggies and point cards that work for your strategy, you can amass the most points and win.

In the co-operative trick-taking game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, the players set out as astronauts on an uncertain space adventure. What are the rumors regarding the unknown planet? The eventful journey through space extends over 50 exciting missions. But this game can only be defeated by meeting the common individual tasks of each player. In order to meet the varied challenges, communication is essential in the team. But this is more difficult than expected in space.

With each mission, the game becomes more difficult. After each mission, the game can be paused and continued later. During each mission, it is not the number of tricks but the right tricks at the right time that count.

The team completes a mission only if every single player is successful in fulfilling their tasks.

You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small, pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner.

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can “buy” as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

Dominion is not a Collectible Card Game (CCG), but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play, leading to immense variety.

As Supreme Commander of your country’s military forces in Air, Land, & Sea, you must carefully deploy your forces across three theaters of war: air, land, and sea. At the start of each battle, you’re dealt a hand of six cards. Players take turns playing cards one at a time, until all cards have been played — or one player decides to withdraw. The order in which you play your cards is critical, as is whether you play them face up or face down. Playing a card face up triggers its tactical ability, but the card must be played in its corresponding theater. Face-down cards can be played to any theater, but have a strength of only 2 and do not grant tactical abilities.

Sometimes, it may be best to withdraw to deny your opponent complete victory, as points are awarded at the end of each battle based on the results. The first player to 12 points wins!

Arboretum is a strategy card game for 2-4 players, aged 10 and up, that combines set collection, tile-laying and hand management while playing in about 25 minutes. Players try to have the most points at the end of the game by creating beautiful garden paths for their visitors.

The deck has 80 cards in ten different colors, with each color featuring a different species of tree; each color has cards numbered 1 through 8, and the number of colors used depends on the number of players. Players start with a hand of seven cards. On each turn, a player draws two cards (from the deck or one or more of the discard piles), lays a card on the table as part of her arboretum, then discards a card to her personal discard pile.

Skull & Roses is the quintessence of bluffing, a game in which everything is played in the players’ heads. Each player plays a face-down card, then each player in turn adds one more card, until someone feels safe enough to state that they can turn several cards face up and get only roses. Other players can then overbid them, saying they can turn even more cards face up. The highest bidder must then turn that number of cards face up, starting with their own. If they show only roses, they win; if they reveal a skull, they lose, placing one of their cards out of play. Two successful challenges win the game. Skull & Roses is not a game of luck; it’s a game of poker face and meeting eyes.

Five Crowns is rummy with a five-suited deck and a twist. The set collection aspect of rummy is basically the same, with groups of three cards in either runs or denominations making a valid meld. The twist is that in each hand, the number of cards required to create a meld increases, from three cards in the first hand to thirteen in the last. The game, therefore, consists of eleven hands.

In each hand, in addition to the six Jokers, other cards are designated as wild: in the first hand, 3s are wild; in the second hand 4s are wild, and so on until in the last hand, the Kings go wild. (You can remember which cards are wild because it matches the number of cards in hand, i.e., in the first hand, you hold three cards and 3s are wild.) A hand ends when a player can meld all cards in her hand after the discard.