15 Best "Pure" Card Games (NONE are in the BGG Top 100!) | No Tokens Allowed - Only Cards

[Music] hello and welcome back to all you can board i'm carlo and in today's video i'm going to be talking about 15 amazing card games each of them uh pure card games pretty much the whole point of this is to look at games that not only use cards as their main sort of feature but i'm trying to eliminate it from contention if possible any games that use you know cardboard or i have extra tokens of sort there's obviously going to be some little exceptions made for certain games i've consulted the official aycb judges to determine which games would be you know eligible for this type of list and which ones aren't i'll just get it out of the way right now and say my number two game of all time race for the galaxy is not eligible for this list because even though it's mostly cards there's no way to get around playing with those the victory point uh chips you really do need those similarly another game that would have made this list otherwise is something like uh called for sale uh auction game with a bunch of cards but you have your money as all these little tokens so there's a couple exceptions i've made that the judges are allowing based on the fact that you know some of these components even though they're not exactly a card you could just ignore it and play the game like it's sort of just a placeholder for where your cards go on the table or that sort of thing so a couple of these do have non-card components but the main reason i've decided to do this video is we've been talking whether it's on our channel or just even off camera in our discord we've had a lot of these discussions lately about the board game geek rankings the top 100 and how they tend to favor these heavier you know games in terms of the weight expensive games games a lot of miniatures nice table presents that kind of thing and there's just so many good small box games out there that do so much with just cards and you know i'll say right now out of these 15 games none of these are in the board game geek top 100 and it's an absolute shame that so many of these first off a bunch of these should be in the top 100s some of these should be even in the top three 400 and they're not there some of these are so criminally underrated and i just feel like it's you know again with with so much focus on these big you know crowdfunding campaigns these big expensive games i i really want to take the time to highlight some of these games that you know most these costs between 10 and 20 bucks are super easy to learn uh and you know could be just as valuable to someone's collection or you know could provide just as good of an experience as a lot of these bigger kind of heftier games that are in the top 100 so um that's pretty much it i'm not going to rank these in any way the way we're going to look at them is just going from oldest game all the way to newest some of these i have physical copies with me here other ones i do not so i'm going to just jump right in with the oldest game on my list which is one i do not own a copy of myself this is six nympht so this was designed this was released in 1994 uh designed by wolfgang kramer it's number 610 on the bgg rankings and what i love most about this game so it's basically a game where you have a hand of cards with a bunch of different numbers the deck has cards numbered from one to a hundred and something and basically you um are start with a certain positive number i don't know what your score starts at like 55 or something like that and you have these cards that have different numbers and these bull symbols on them and simultaneously every player is going to pick a card put it face down then all players are going to reveal them and there's going to be these rows of cards on the table with numbers and all the cards that get revealed from each player are going to go sort of in sequential ascending order into these rows and when a row fills up if your card takes the last spot in the row you're going to end up taking all the cards in the row and taking cards is bad you lose points and it's basically you know whenever someone gets into negative below zero it'll trigger the end game whoever has the most points wins i love the aspect again the fact this game came out 94 this is almost 30 years old already um and you have the idea of not actually wanting to get the cards so you're there's a hand management game because you start with all these numbers and you have to decide which one of these am i going to save for later for something else which one am i going to play now how am i going to get the best out of this and it's the reveal moment i've only ever played this actually on board game arena but the reveal of when the cards go up and you see them sliding into the slots where they go into the sequential order and everyone's going oh oh wait a sec oh wait oh no oh and then someone has to take a bunch of cards and get a bunch of negative points awesome creates a bunch of laughter around the table and it surprises me that this game came out in 94 and uh it's sort of gotten a bit of a resurgence lately it seems maybe thanks to board game arena but still a game that i don't think gets talked about enough so that is six nymphs then uh the following year we got high society this is one that i own and i've only played once so far but i love it uh this is an auction game designed by reiner kunitzia this is number 551 as of now on the board game geek rankings uh auction game where every player starts with the hand of cards um that represents their money and you're basically flipping from a separate deck of cards a card that goes up for auction that has a value on it and then players are using their cards to go around the table and bid sometimes it's a good card sometimes it might be a bad card that you're bidding to not have to get stuck with basically once the end game triggers the first thing you do is you check to see how much money everyone has left the person with the least amount of money is automatically eliminated because the idea is that they spent the most money throughout the bidding and then the winners determined from the players who are left over what i love about this game that it does amazingly well with cards is the fact that you have again this limited hand i think you have 12 cards at the start and they range from you know 1 to 25 or 1 000 to 25 000 or whatever and there's big gaps you know from the the next highest after 25 is i think 20 and then there's like 15 and 12 and all these gaps and when you play a card whether you win or lost the bid i mean there's certain ways you can get your cards back but once you've spent a card you don't get it back and you don't get changed so your cards are this hand management kind of resource of like you know even the number one card which technically only increases your bid by one it's only worth one but once you play that you can't outbid someone by one on a future turn so the value of these cards changes and let's say you end near the end of the game you're left with your 25 and you're 18 and all these big cards and you just want to bid someone by three well if your lowest card left is 12 if you want to bid you're gonna have to spend that 12. so it's a really interesting kind of decision throughout the game of when do i spend this card and what's it going to get me how much is it going to be worth later versus what it'll allow me to outbid people with so very cool stuff one i cannot wait to play more uh that is high society then we skip ahead a couple years to 1997 and that is to bonanza which i do own but i don't have a copy here with me so there's bonanza uv rosenberg this is number 482 on the board game geek uh list which again is so low um and this is a game about trading beans um and this one technically yes there is something other than cards it's just the being fields but you could play without the bean field they're sort of just a placeholder but you're basically playing you know you have a hand of cards that represent different beans and one of the things i love most about this game is the fact that you cannot rearrange the order of the cards in your hand and that's where all the negotiation comes from because on your turn you start by you have to play the card at the front of your hand and then you can also play the second card in your hand but you have limited fields where you can plant only one type of bean in that field so you know sometimes you're forced to feel like you're going to have to play a card which if you don't have that bean type on your field and you don't have any empty beans you're gonna have to get rid of an a field of beans and do a harvest preemptively before you were to you know get to this point threshold you're gonna have to harvest early to make room for something so you're trying to trade your cards based on where they are in your hand which cards you do or don't want you're trying to trade with people but when people sense that you're desperate they think oh they just want to get rid of that in their hand because they don't want to be forced to play this card so it's a really interesting thing where and even the points when you score them you just flip the cards over and those have a coin on the back to show your points so just a really smart design that it has this awesome little negotiation system keeps track of the points you know the whole thing with the order you player and it's it's all just with cards amazing game very underrated especially as far as ubi rosenberg game goes games go people always look at his big box games but i think bonanza is you know just as worthy of being on the top 100 as as a lot of his other big box games now we're going to jump ahead to 1999 and we're going to look at lost cities so this is a reiner canezia two player only card game and this is number 328 on the board game geek rankings as of now uh you're probably familiar with the game so i won't get too into it but you're basically uh there's five colors of cards and you're playing cards to try and pursue these expeditions and the more cards uh they're gonna be cards ranging from value uh two through i believe it's ten as well as these three kind of wage wager cards for each color and you're trying to play these cards to kind of wager how far you can go into this expedition if you you know every column sort of once you play a card you automatically start at negative 20 and then the cards that you have there are trying to bump you from the negative category into the positives you're basically starting your turn by playing a card and then drawing one off the board so you can pick up your opponent's discards and that kind of thing and that's one of the things i love most that it does with the cards is first off i like that most of these reiner canetsya games he has you playing a card first and drawing at the end of your turn so you're not starting your turn by gaining a card and having to reassess your options by gaining new information you might already know as soon as your turn starts i play a card and then i draw and then i can think about my next turn when it's my opponent's turn and the fact that when you're playing cards you can either play them uh you you know you're discarding to this common pile where your opponent is going to be picking up cards so you have to hold on to them long enough that by the time you discard it your opponent doesn't want it anymore or you're trying to hold out hope as to you know maybe i cannot play this color or show that i'm going to be going into green cards because maybe my opponent will discard a green that i pick up before i start playing green cards awesome game plays over three rounds you add up your scores across all three rounds really good things we've talked about this on the channel before so i'll just leave it at that but that is lost cities then we're skipping ahead just one year same designer and battle line which in my opinion is an even better two-player only card game also by reiner kenitzia which i left at home unfortunately um and this is another one that technically i'm cheating a little bit but the judges confirmed that you know those little wooden components that represent the flags yes technically they're in the box but you could just you know to determine who won a flag you could just maybe turn one of the cards on the winning side or something to replicate that but uh what i love about this game is you're basically playing nine simultaneous poker hands uh three card poker hands where you're trying to create you know runs or flushes or straight flushes and whatnot um in each of these rows to win these battles and you're trying to win either three battles in an order or any five battles across the board what i love about this is that there's one card of every like every card in the in the game is unique there's one card of each number and and across a few different colors but the idea is you're sometimes winning battles by proving that the opponent cannot beat you anymore so let's say i had a three of a kind sixes on my board already and let's say my opponent had two sevens on their side i know that they're holding out for that other seven and if they get it they can beat me but if i can prove based on the other cards on the board that that other seven is not there's no sevens left in the deck for example then i will win that flag so i might be holding there might be one seven left but it might be in my hand and i can't show that card but if i were to play it somewhere else and then i can say to my opponent hey look i you know there's two sevens there there's only four more in the deck and you can see they're all out on the board therefore it's impossible for you to draw the seven therefore i win this flag because my three of kind sixes can't be beat so there's this aspect of holding cards and playing certain cards even though they might not help you on the board other than just proving that somewhere else you've won a battle love it it's genius i haven't really seen that in any other games that i can think of and it's part of the reason why battleline is one of my absolute favorite games of all time it's in my top 10 of all time yeah and it's number 250 on the board game geek rankings again super underrated it should be way higher than that i think all right next we're going to talk about coloredo this is a very small box card game this was released in 2003 designed by michael shocked this is currently number 585 on the board game geek rankings uh you can try this on board game arena which is where i first tried it i highly recommend because you if otherwise if you did like i did for years and i looked at this and just thought oh this weird colored chameleon small box card game i kind of dismissed it i didn't think there was going to be much to it but you're basically drawing a card from a deck and putting it into one of the rows on the board and every round each player is going to end up with one of those rows of cards the card the rows are going to have a maximum of three cards and basically you're going to be either choosing to take a row when it might have one card that you really need and no other cards so you might only get one card that round or you might take a row that has three cards and maybe two of them you really need and one of them you don't need and it's going to hurt you because at the end of the game you're looking at all the different colors of cards that you've gathered and you're only scoring points for the three colors that you have the most cards in so you're going to score positive points and then you're going to look at all your remaining cards you might have you know one or two of them certain colors and those are going to subtract from your score so it's a really interesting dynamic of trying to decide where to put cards in which row to you know offset the temptation that someone might have you know you might see a row where you know someone's going to take that card but well then i'll put this card that i know that's going to lose them some points to offset that and on your turn you have to decide do i want to just take what's out there or do i want to flip another card and add it to the row and then wait and hold out and see if i'll even be able to get that row that that row might be taken by the time it comes around to me so really interesting game and it has a sort of unknown uh end game thing because you you know there's you put the end game card near the bottom of the deck and so you can't completely card count and know when the game is gonna end because that card's gonna come out as a surprise to tell you when the game ends anyway colorado is awesome plays up to five players excellent little filler game okay uh next we're going to skip ahead five years here to dominion this is a 2008 game that actually won the spielberg's yards uh designed by donald x vacarino this is the highest ranked one of any game i'm talking about on the list here it's number 108 on the board game geek rankings and dominion you know a lot of people will say these days that dominion is kind of um uh it's been improved on or it's kind of outdated now or whatnot but i i've played it fairly recently i think it's still an amazing game and sure it's not maybe my favorite deck builder anymore but every time i play it i still love it and there's a couple things i think it does really well with the use of cards and it is the biggest box if any of the games gonna be talking about it's definitely the biggest box but it's because of how many different cards there are and there's 10 of each card so you're basically setting up this market uh every game of 10 card options and each of those options is going to have a stack of i think it's either 8 or 10 and you're basically building a deck but you one of the interesting things i love that this game does is that the points are directly built into the cards so you buy cards that are just points and nothing else so at the end of the game when you're counting up your points and this doesn't count any expansions of course it's just a base game you're looking through all your cards and seeing the point values on them but those cards when you actually draw them throughout the game they're not doing anything you're not scoring points when you draw them those points are only happening at the end of the game so they're dead weight they're just slowing you know cluttering your deck but the longer you wait to buy those victory point cards if someone else starts buying them sooner you might not have as much time before the game ends to buy those so it's an interesting decision of how early do i want to start buying those victory point cards how many of them do i buy you know what's the state of my deck how many cards do i have in there can i afford to be starting to fill this with victory point cards or do i wait a little longer build up my engine a little more and then start the race for the victory points so interesting little timing considerations that i think it does really well and even just the mixing and matching of all the cards in the market to you know you could remove one of the cards and put in a different one and that might completely change the complexity or the the uh kind of state of the game because you might find a different combo on board just from that one other card that's available with those other nine from the same game before so i could talk about dominion a lot more but i'll leave it at that it's an excellent game uh next we're going to move on to innovation so innovation is a game from 2010 designed by carl chunnick and this is ranked number 346 on the bgg rankings this is one of the most impressive um games i've just played in general and one that i've been uh sort of warming up to more and more over time i've been playing it a lot kind of a running game uh going with uh my friend braden on board game arena lately as soon as we're done we just rematch we keep playing over and over and over um it's an amazing kind of like civilization themed card game where you're playing cards that allow you to do all kinds of stuff there's these effects that trigger that basically you have to have these different symbols on your cards that represent different types of like technologies or advancements and basically uh there's ability there's dogmas that happen where you either have to have the same amount of symbols or more as your opponent there's also these demand dogmas that you can demand you can say you have to do this based on the fact that i have the majority on these symbols the coolest thing though to me is the cards splaying and that has to play off the symbols the splaying is basically fanning imagine fanning the cards out to the left the right or up to reveal more symbols so that you now have the majority on someone so if i want to use this card i might have fewer symbols so i can't use the ability or my opponent's gonna you know use the ability first before i get to do it and so the splaying of the cards you're stacking cards on top of each other that you know you might have eight purple cards on top of each other that aren't splayed and you're you know you might be taking cards from the bottom to put in a score pile you can tuck more cards under display different direct there's just all there's cards that you get that just say if this condition is met you win the game so there's all kinds of different win conditions it's just it's a game that continues to blow my mind every time i play it and the fact that it's just you know carl chadwick is kind of known as like the master of the multi-use cards um but i haven't seen a game do quite what innovation does with just that that deck of cards and it feels like a nearly infinitely replayable game amazing game it's on board game arena highly recommend you try it out if you haven't yet okay next we're going to jump ahead five years to my favorite game probably of any of the ones that i'm talking about today the highest ranked one on the list or maybe i guess those number no it's probably number two i can't remember which if i had this higher or battle line but this is arboretum incredible game plays two to four players um designed by dan kessar this is uh ranked 289 currently i've done a video on the channel before where i talk about why i think this is best at four players which goes against the kind of popular opinion on board game geek where people seem to think that it's best with two um so you can go check out that video if you want to know more my thoughts on player count but um i'm just gonna focus on what i love about this game that it does with the cards specifically so you basically are building a tableau of cards and you're putting these trees of different cards in different colors in front of you and laying them out in a certain formation to try and maximize your points but at the end of the game you're only going to gain the right to score the points for the cards in front of you if you have the highest total value of cards remaining in your hand for that type of tree species so let's say you know the orange maple trees you know three or four of us could all have these cards in front of us but at the end of the game we're gonna look at what's left in our hand you're gonna have i believe it's eight cards left in your hand or maybe seven um and you're gonna reveal the cards of that color and whoever has the highest value is the only player that gets to score so really interesting hand management aspect here where you're trying to decide the value of your cards in terms of am i going to get more to this from playing it or am i going to have to hold on to it to make sure that i can actually earn the right to score for the cards that i have on the board so the higher value cards you have not only can they score you more points but the higher value also helps you win the right to potentially score those points so not only which cards to keep for yourself to try and make sure you can score those points but if you see someone else an opponent who has a tableau that might score them you know 12 points in one color then you might be holding onto a card to try and deny them the points at the end so this game every single turn is agonizing incredible game i could play this probably hundreds of times and never get tired of it does so much with so little just numbers and colors with a loose theme about these trees yeah always surprise me what this game does with just a deck of cards that is arboretum okay next up is a game that is only one year older or sorry newer than that from 2016 that is hero realms so this is on the board again geek rankings is currently number 221 so this is a deck building game kind of like dominion in certain ways um just in the sense that it feels like a fairly pure deck builder but you're not buying cards that are just you know straight up victory points what this does that i think is really cool is that it's a deck building game where again it's just cards but everything comes from one shared deck so both players are you know there's going to be cards that come out from this market and you're basically each player starts with a certain amount of life i think it's 50 health you're trying to attack each other and do a certain amount of damage until the other player reaches zero health and loses the game so there's four different like type colors of cards and you can get creatures or champions they're called that stay out in front of you that can kind of block so that you can't actually attack um your opponent and whatnot you're gonna be buying cards with colors and what i like that this game does is there's cards that'll have uh the symbol or the color of the card also in the bottom showing that if you get another card of that color let's say i have this you know blue card if i play another blue card there might be a basic ability that always triggers but there might be another thing that has a blue symbol at the bottom that shows if you have at least one other blue card in play now the secondary ability will trigger so you're trying to build your deck of either maybe probably just one or two colors you don't want to go across all four colors because you're going to have all these cards that don't you know you don't get the full effect out of if you're not triggering that bonus effect and of course each of the colors has its own kind of theme you know the white or the yellow cards have more of like a healing or protection kind of theme you know the red ones allow you to like trash cards from your deck to thin it out to be more efficient that kind of thing so you're trying to decide early on from the five cards that are available in the market which color are you going to go into and if your opponent starts buying cards of the same color do you stubbornly keep doing that or do you buy cards from a different color and try to build your deck in a different way so it's an interesting thing because unlike a game like dominion which you talked about you're just racing to buy victory points whereas this when you actually fighting your opponent and a lot of these games where you're normally attacking your opponent games like you know magic the gathering and stuff is like deck construction it's not something where you're buying cards from a common deck putting them in and then immediately going head to head and fighting your opponents so um it's not one of my favorite ones on the list or anything like that it's a game i've cooled on a little bit over the years but still an excellent game um and yeah if you're familiar with star realms this is just the newer version that has a fantasy theme instead of sci-fi all right after hero realms we moved up to 2018 and we're gonna look at a game called spralopolis so this is definitely the smallest in terms of just you know again it's a little wallet there's 18 cards in here with a tiny little rule book and that is it this is ranked number 397 as of now on the boarding geek rankings um and yeah this came out in 2018 so this is a game where you basically have these double-sided cards um i have there's a video on our channel as well where i compare sprawl off list to agropolis the newer one so you can go check that out as well for a more detailed look at it but basically one side of the cards has your scoring conditions and the other side of your cards has your actual city like layout terrain kind of cards and the idea is you're going to shuffle up this 18 card deck pick three cards at random that are going to show you your scoring conditions for the game that are going to determine how you're going to get most of your points or potentially lose points um and then the 15 cards that are left get shuffled up and they stay on their city uh side basically and this game plays solo all the way up to four players i think it works best solo and you're laying out your cards and connecting roads and trying to put different you know districts either together or build your city in a different way based on the you know point conditions that you have for that particular game so there's so many different combinations even just switching out one point card for a different one can completely change the way you're gonna go for your game if you have objectives that are competing against each other rather than incentivizing you to uh you know do one thing that helps meet two or three conditions there's just always a different puzzle to solve a fascinating game that does so much with so little again like you can fit this in your pocket you get multiple copies in your pocket there's expansions that come in little sleeves as well you can just fit in your pocket take them anywhere you go this is pretty much the ideal travel game the ideal you know you got 15 20 minutes to kill on your lunch break kind of game amazing little game that is sprawl opolis that was published by button shy games which i will say for those who don't know they do a ton of these kind of wallet-sized games so definitely check them out if you're interested in something with such a low footprint and such a low cost next up we're going to talk about point salad so this is a 2019 release uh designed and published by the folks of flat out sorry it's published by aeg and flat out but designed by the folks from flat out games this is a two to six player card game uh it was currently ranked number 390 on the board game geek rankings so in some ways you know there are certain things it does that you've seen a lot in other games set collection scoring conditions you know you're getting cards that tell you you know at the end of the game you score one point for every tomato where you score three points for every you know pair of tomato and carrot that you have or you know if you have the most onions of any player you score this many points so there's all kinds of different scoring conditions but the cards are double-sided one side is the scoring condition and the other side has a veggie and the interesting thing is on the scoring side in the corners of the scoring card it also shows what veggie it has a little symbol like a tomato to show that what's on the other side of the card is a tomato and you're drafting cards from the central uh area there's gonna be six cards up for grab there's three columns but anytime you take these veggie cards at the top of the rows above the veggie cards the cards are on their point side so you can either take two veggie cards face up any two veggie cards or you can take one point uh conditioned card anytime you take veggies though to refill the empty spaces you flip point cards off the top of the deck onto the veggie side and fill that space so the board is going to be refilled and you're trying to decide you know maybe i know that my opponent really needs that scoring card but instead of just taking the scoring card to deny them if i take the veggie that's in that row i know that scoring card is going to flip over and now they won't be able to get it there's a way that on your turn you can flip one of your scoring cards over to the veggie side so if you're not meeting a condition you can kind of you know switch it over to a veggie instead but once it's a veggie you can no longer flip it over the scoring side so i just love that aspect of you know what you're drafting you have to consider how the cards are going to flip over are you going to draft a veggie that's going to make one of the point cards that you wanted disappear and turn into a veggie are you going to take a lot of point cards first and then try to find the veggies that meet those conditions or are you instead going to get a bunch of veggies and then find the point cards that'll get the most out of the veggies you have super simple game but it surprises me every time i play it point salad all right so we had some bigger gaps between the the years released these games earlier in the list now we've got some that are kind of closer together we obviously just looked at point salad from 2019 now we've got two games from 2020 the first one is going to be stellar so this is one we have talked about in the channel before it's a two player only game a designed by matt riddle and ben pinchback this was uh 2106 currently on the board game geek rankings which is absolutely ridiculous i'm gonna go ahead and imagine that this is just because not enough people have played it because it is a really really good game um basically in this game you're only going to get 11 turns you're gonna be building out this tableau of cards uh that is sort of your your telescope and then you have also your notebook which determines how you score the cards in your telescope kind of thing so i'm not going to get all into the rules but i'm going to mention what i really like that this game does well there's a couple things i really like this game does with cards first off as i mentioned you're only getting 11 turns but every turn you're going to be placing two cards uh one in your notebook and one in your telescope you're going to start by playing one card and then whatever the number is on that card there's gonna be a menu of options from i think one to five that you can choose from and whichever card you play first you choose whether it goes into your notebook or your telescope and whatever number is on there let's say it's number three then i have to take the card that's in the number three slot and that one has to go either into my telescope or notebook whichever one the first card didn't go into so you're starting your turn by choosing which card do i want to play both in terms of where where is it going to go in terms of the points it's going to get me but also it's going to determine what other card i get to pick up from the market to then put that card somewhere else so it everything has these kind of ramifications everything is tied to something else it feels like and even when you're just filling out your tell the spots in your telescope there's different like sections of your telescope that you have to have the majority of compared to the other player in order to score points off of them even the way that you're scoring points based on what you have in your notebook and how that corresponds to what you have in your telescope there's just a lot to consider with again similar to a lot of the cards on this list like if you just strip the theme right from it and everything it's basically just numbers and colors or numbers and symbols and that's what i appreciate so much about these card games is that it's basically the equivalent of pen and paper with numbers and symbols and letters like most these games just have that and it's just fancied up with some cardstock and some artwork and whatever but yeah stellar is an excellent game one that i think got really overlooked by a lot of people it's a bit of a table hog takes up a lot of space and it might be a little bit of you know rules complexity to wrap your head around for the first time but once you get a play of this under your belt i can see you know most people i've heard who have talked about this game really do enjoy it quite a bit so yeah that is stellar the other game from 2020 that i want to talk about very different type of game is abandon all artichokes so this is designed by emma larkins i believe this is her first um published design this one is currently ranked 1720 on the board game geek rankings this is on board game arena in case you want to try it out it's a game for two to four players it says it plays in about 20 minutes i think that sounds about right the idea is it's a deck destruction game so it's got deck building as well but you start with a deck of these 10 artichoke cards and the idea is you're trying to as the title goes abandon all your artichokes so the way the game is going to end is you know on your turn you're going to be picking something up from a market of cards you're basically adding a card to your hand you're going to be playing cards from your hand and then at the end of your turn you're going to draw cards from your deck back up to five cards as soon as someone draws five cards at the end of their turn and none of those five cards are an artichoke they win the game so that's something i haven't seen in any other games i'm not i don't know if it's entirely unique it could be in other games but the fact that you your primary goal is tr is getting rid of the artichokes most deck building games you're looking at oh what do i want to buy what i want to add you're and you know trashing is something that you can consider you can think about getting rid of cards and i guess technically in abandoned artichokes you could just fill up your deck and hope that you get you know such a bloated deck that you might still have eight nine ten artichokes in there and maybe you get lucky and draw those five but realistically if you want a shot at winning you're gonna have to thin out your deck but also know which cards to add at what times you know which players to target because you might think that player has probably two artichokes left in their deck that player over there might have four or five so if i'm going to do something i might want to go for the player who's closer to winning or whatnot very cool game it's not something that is going to be like one of my favorite games of all time or anything like that and i think it works much better with the more players you add best as a four-player game but yeah the fact that it's that deck destruction and the whole drawing cards to see if you win at the end of your turn it's just something i haven't really seen in other games and something i think this game does very well plus it's just a very kind of like accessible approachable game for families for kids whatever so but something adults can still enjoy quite a bit as well so yeah that's abandoned all artichokes and the final game i want to talk about today the newest one on the list of course from 2021 enchanted plumes so i will mention this is a review copy that just got sent to us uh designed by brendan hansen this is currently ranked 6247 i mean i imagine not a lot of people even played it yet i believe this is something that initially got uh on on kickstarter and was recently fulfilled basically this is this shares a lot of similarities to two games i already spoke about on here which is lost cities and arboretum because you are it's basically a hand management game and there's different colors and numbers of for each color basically they're unique cards though i think there's 10 different colors it depends on the player count but you're basically playing these cards down in formations that go into a you're playing rows of cards that then decrease one card fewer in each row until you try to get down to one card so you might get a top row of four cards then three then two then one and that might be your your plume for your uh peacock and the way it works is at the end of the game when you count points for every separate plume you've started the cards on the top row are negative points and you're only going to offset that by the positive points that come below it but you don't know when the game is going to end and you might not you know get as many positive cards in that plume as you wanted or you might wanna you might have a bunch of cards of a certain color and you can only play cards on a row if there was a color or card of that color played on the row above it so you have to decide which colors do i want to play and what number is at the top row what kind of negative hit do i want to start with and what colors do you want to leave myself available that now i can you know i have the rest of the game to try and get as many cards of that color and of the highest value in this plume as i can before it finishes and if you manage to get that final card at the bottom and you've completed your plume then you're gonna score bonus points one point per card in that plume so you can play the whole game trying one giant epic plume you can keep starting multiple different ones you can have four or five six by the end of the game there's a lot of freedom to do what you want and you're switching cards out from your hand for ones in the market so you're putting stuff out there that other players might want or you're taking cards that other players have put out that now you want you can draw blindly from the top of the deck a lot of cool stuff and it basically feels like again it has taken some of the things of games like lost cities and arboretum uh in terms of the hand management and higher scoring but it's also taken something it took the aspect of colorado that i mentioned with the uh unknown end game thing where you know one of the things that i think maybe might be a slight fault of lost cities in arboretum is the fact that when it gets down to the end you can kind of card count and a bit and know okay if i do this i'll trigger the end of the game oh the i know i'm going to get one more turn and then the game ends on that person's turn not the case with enchanted plumes because you have this game end card that's somewhere in the last seven so you never know is it going to come back around to me and you don't know is someone going to draw from that deck because they're going to swap out cards from the middle you might get two or three more turns than you think the game might end before you think it's going to and it's just about kind of that push your luck and deciding where you want to put your cards do you want to try and maximize one plume or divide your attention equally this is something we'll be probably talking about on the channel more as we've gotten to play more but excellent little game that really surprised me that is enchanted plumes and that is it that is 15 of the most standout cards only or pure card games that i could think of i'm sure there's others out there that i either haven't played before that i might have overlooked i'm curious to hear what you think of these and what are some other ones that i might have missed if there's a game you know of that's either 100 cards or could be played with just the cards and the other components might not be all that important let me know in the comments below let me know what you think of some of these um which ones are your absolute favorites and also what do you think do these card games deserve to be higher on the list do you agree with me that you know part of the reason i did this is i know a lot of people are you know strapped for cash and you're wanting to buy games and a lot of the time those games on the wish list are these you know 80 100 dollar games or you're tempted by something on kickstarter and just know that there's almost always going to be a you know if not better at least a an equal option that's just like a more affordable game takes up less room and even just the variety i tried to cover a variety of different you know mechanisms and interaction styles in these games you know there's negotiation there's a lot of trash talking there's games that have hand management and uh you know set collection all kinds of stuff here um but yeah i'm curious if i you know missed any gaps in what a card game can do that maybe none of these fills so yeah let me know in the comments below better yet if you want to talk with some other gamers about this hop on over to our discord server there's a link in the description below otherwise that's it for today thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: All You Can Board

Views: 49,843

Keywords: best card games, top 10 card games, top card games, top only card games, top small games, top filler games, top cheap board games, top cheap card games, card games, board games, review

Id: f4nIp6V8Ooc

Length: 35min 1sec (2101 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022