The 5 Best New Card Games

baby makes four oh I was just alphabetizing my chairs it's important to stay busy during self-isolation but what if you don't have chairs well you might consider playing a card game board games cheaper simpler more easygoing breezy sibling in this video I'm gonna walk you through no less than five of the best new card games to arrive on the market in the last year but a lot of people asked me quince how do you find the world's best card games I'm telling you it's simple great card games are everywhere you just have to look for mandala is a two-player game and something of a hidden gem contained inside this box are some square cards and this bit of fabric that looks like a bit of a discarded t-shirt but wait there's more this is a game with six colors of cards and to start you deal each player six cards at random and place two cards into the middle of the game's two mandalas now in real life mandalas are spiritual tools used for focus relaxation or the opening of one's mind but this is a card game and you and I are Philistines so we're going to be using them to get points on your turn you're gonna take a color from your hand and play it either into your side of the mandala or into the central mountain strip and when a mandala has all six colors it is completed and you destroy it by taking turns to harvest cards from that central mountain strip and putting them into your scoring area however the first time that you score a color let's say we're harvesting this mandala and I collect these two greens then it's your turn because I haven't collected any greens yet that first green actually drunk slots satisfyingly into my scoring strip meaning greens are worth one point to me and as you can see one two three four the later you pick up a color the more points all future cards of that color are worth and the second green goes in my scoring pile known as my cup which is cute so this mechanic is going to dramatically change how you build mandalas is you watch your opponent's scoring strip like a flick here my opponent has purple here which means purple cars are worth a whopping three points to them so I perhaps as I'm building this mandala on the right might place purple cards into my scoring strip because each color can only be present in the mandala once it means purple can't go here in my opponent site or in the middle where we actually harvest cards so that's good right well maybe or it might be me compromising because whoever has more cards in their selfish third of the mandala picks first from the middle of the mountain when that mandala is destroyed but here's the catch when you play cards into your selfish third you only draw one card at the end of your turn where if you were to play cards into the mountain you instead draw one two three mandala is magnificently thought-provoking it's hard to take your turn in this game without conjuring a from deep within your opponent and because it's so fun and interesting and takes just 15 minutes it's the kind of game I cannot resist playing a best-of-three of and then a best-of-five and then suddenly it's 2:00 in the morning and perhaps you and your opponent have gotten so close you seal the evening with a kiss or do you I'll never tell despite the trappings of spirituality mandala feels like nothing other than fencing except you're fencing with two swords at the same time which the Olympics continues to not allow because they're cowards but I see every turn feels like an attack run round by playing a color your opponent was hoping you wouldn't have or a block the next by wham slapping down a ton of colors that you'd spent five minutes gathering together to deny your opponent control of one of the two mountains and because the cards you're scoring get increasingly valuable every 15 minute game gets more and more tense and exciting as the game approaches this crescendo of point-scoring opportunity there's a nice dash of luck in the design as well at the end of your time drawing cards and hope and you get the colors that you need yes and getting them it's like ticket to ride in that way it is thrilling I have not seen anyone talking about mandala and that is a crime not least because when you start opening your mind and understanding the broad strategies involved which happens with the slow majesty of the opening of an automated garage door you might start thinking that perhaps this theme isn't so ill chosen after all don't you worry amazing card games are everywhere you just have to hang on a tickle [Music] Rachelle's 1897 is a card game version of a bigger board game called bruh shells 1893 in which you play wait for it historical Belgian art magnates a pitch that is surely up there with Agricola's air kids who wants to be a German subsistence farmer but while this site chose not to review bruh shells 1893 because we think there are better big-box management games the card game is a miniature Marvel each round you deal out a grid of things that a Belgian Art Nouveau trailblazer might want and if you've not heard of Art Nouveau it's a lot like normal art but curvy players then take turns paying their varied double-sided architect cards to take the place of one of these goodies so that you can then get it you might get some art or sell some art or arrange an exhibition of your art or get a powerful patron or get building materials or turn those building materials into a building in this feisty cramped little Scrabble for cash and points but be careful because at the end of the round the player who spent the most money on their architecture in each column gets this huge reward waiting at the bottom also for every completed seal of the city of Belgium whoever has the most architects in that given seal is gonna get bonus points so players are trying to cherry-pick the rewards they want which is also you bidding in an auction for these rewards which is also an area control game it's so neat but sooner or later and it's definitely going to be sooner you like most artists will realize that what you're doing is completely financially unsustainable but unlike most artists you have a solution on your turn instead of sending an architect to this grid you can send them to town instead getting money or cards or activating your patrons and these spaces are ultra powerful and completely free but there's a catch because the player who sends the most architects to town in each of the games for round has them imprisoned bridge valve 1897 is wild it is suave and confident and creative and unusual and lots of games have tried to pack big experiences into tiny slim cheap little boxes but Rachelle's 1897 is the first one that I honestly just love because it doesn't try and replicate a big game but the feeling of a big game which is very simply giving you a few avenues of how you want to play and then trying to figure out how to do it efficiently while also widely checking your opponents so that they can't do the thing they want to do also my goodness this is just such a foxy spin on worker placement worker placement games are ones where players take turns to put out a worker and get a reward Rachelle's is interesting because it gives you more workers than you could possibly afford to use in one round it lets you play recklessly and send them all to prison there's just so many ways to get creative or screw yourself over or screw yourself over creatively also and how cute is this the box comes with this little pamphlet on visiting real-life Brussels maybe you could go and see real-life Art Nouveau in real life Brussels maybe just give it a few months though for your health oh what's that I bet that's the postman delivering the next of our great new card games [Music] [Music] there is a lot of buzz around air land and sea and rightly so a buzz like a distant plane coming into air lifts your expectations about just how fun the game with a stuffy World War two theme can be so in this two-player game each round you're going to deal out the three fronts of air land and sea and of the game smelt 18 card deck you were going to shuffle it together gonna deal yourself six cards your opponent six cards and six cards will be removed from the game which is part of the joy of having this tiny tiny deck if you're not holding one of the games can't you know there is exactly a 50% chance your opponent is holding it players then take turns taking a card from their hand and playing it into their side of one of the three theaters either face-up for its strength and its power or facedown in what's known as improvisation for to power into any theater some armchair generals will tell you it's a bad idea to put a plane under water or artillery into the sky but you you've got a war to win hooah once both players have played all six of their cards you're going to count up the strengths in each of the three fields and figure out which of you won to at least two of the three battles and that player gets a bunch of points however and this is my favorite raw of any game I played last year on your turn instead of playing a card you can instead withdraw surrendering the round if you think you've lost and the earlier in the round that you surrender the less points your opponent gets so always in air land and sea as you're trading shots with your opponent slowly trying to be coy as you reveal the cards that you were dealt there is this question sat in your head like so much hard candy and that question is have I lost and what a player does withdraw which happens all the time it has this miraculous game effect where both players feel good for the person who withdrew smartly resisting the urge to just see how the round was gonna go they feel Oh clever and when of course your opponent concedes you either enjoy this warm fuzzy feeling of absolute dominance or the sense that you got away with murder I concede your opponent nobody says you're like because next turn you were gonna concede to top it all off and I didn't see has the springy goofy unpredictable action of a bouncy castle or a pillow fight in a darkened basement because lots of cars you play have the power to flip other cards facedown when you can use that to neutralize the keystone of your opponent's plan or perhaps to flip over a card that you played facedown to dull dull not a word to trick your opponent to feeling safe and then you flip it face-up and it's powerful it changes the fight because whenever I can't split face-up its power happens potentially for the second time that round but also at its simplest this is a game where you have to win two of the three fronts so maybe I'm going for land and air I think I've got a good chance of that I don't want to play too heavily into land or air because then my opponent will know I've got a good hand for land it's not clever it just sounds clever and that means that they're gonna play zero cards in to land and increase their chances of winning air and sea oh oh oh nothing about this game is complicated and yet literally everything about it is hard there's just no such thing as a dull game of air land and sea not just because you have no idea what card your opponent is gonna play next not just because the surrendering mechanic means you always have a choice even when you're losing but because the game is all about making your opponent to surrender as late as possible so even if you did get dealt a killer hand and your opponent has definitely lost then the game for you is making them realise that as late as possible perhaps even choosing to play some of your high numbers face down just because which sometimes means you then lose a game you definitely should have won because you got too greedy not since love-letter has a game done so much with so few cards I feel like the tabletop industry has forgotten about of letter recently did you forget about love letter journey [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] we're looking had a lot of exquisitely clever games today tournament at Camelot and the new standalone sequel tournament at Avalon aren't stupid exactly but more like a very clever person designed them as a prank both of them are trick-taking games for up to six players or you can combine them to play a huge 12 player game which already makes no sense because these games are best with four players if you've not played a trick-taking game before this one is quite simple so the Knights of Camelot are having a melee and each round starts with each of you being dealt a huge beautiful hand of 12 cards look at that then in each play someone is going to take a card from their hand and play it for example I've played a sword card that means all of my opponents must now play a sword card if they have it cards with a matching number of flipped facedown and then whoever played the lowest card who performed the worst in this particular contest is injured that this player played a six so they're going to take all of these cards as damage but they then get to lead the next trick choosing a card from their hand swords again and then everyone else has to play that if you cannot play a card of the contest that was chosen by that player you take five points of shame damage which is a very silly mental image and I wholeheartedly approve you're gonna do this over and over and over again with a dwindling dwindling dwindling hand of cards until eventually you have no cards left at which point everyone adjusts their half according to how many contests they lost and the game is over when someone dies right at which point the least injured knight around the table is the winner of the game there are some extra rules here like alchemy is wild and some cards you play a poisoned and whoever picks them up takes double damage and Merlin is it and if this was all of the tournament at Camelot was it would be a perfectly satisfying silly trick taking game with as much gambling as your average lamb but it is not all that this game is brace yourself at the start of the game you get to choose a player character that is going to break the rules of the game for you with the eagerness of a child attacking a pinata exactly like shut up and sit down favorite Cosmic Encounter but it gets better you have a super version of your power that kicks in when your health gets low enough whoever's playing Guinevere gets to pick a suit of card whether that arrows or swords at the start of each 20 that's going to deal double damage with the other players only learning what that suit is at the end of the round whoever's playing Mordred can always play a card of the deception suit to politely darker out of a fight and not be involved at all ah and Morgan is my favorite if you're playing Morgan and you play a poisoned card into any particular trick suddenly it's the player who played the highest card into that trick that loses hmm yeah that sounds pretty dumb you might be saying at this point but we're just getting to start it players who are losing also get dealt godsend cards that help you bend the rules of the game even further and some of these are bizarrely deep cuts from judeo-christian history so you might get a chariot that's pretty cool or the Holy Grail or and I love this the Lance that pierced the side of our Lord Jesus Christ sounds a bit overpowered for a friendly fight the net result is a game that amplifies one of my absolute favorite things about card games which is an occurrence where some combination of bad luck and a bad decision result in one player around the table getting absolutely ruined and everyone around the table giggling at them and this is the core of trick-taking games where you don't want to get left with the same trick where one player will lose at wrecking off try again and AH lose another trick everyone ends up so giggly that the bad thing didn't happen to them and with all of the peculiar modifiers that come from the characters and the god sent cards with characters that actually change and get stronger as they get injured it's that much easier to make a mistake it's that much harder to predict what's gonna happen next and it's that much funnier and sillier and less fair and yet also Rob being dumb all of these were the rule modifiers give sort of gamer e gamers a lot to think about so to summarize these games are funny they are smart and of course they are just also good trick taking games there's a reason this is one of the most popular genres of card games in the world other things I love the medieval presentation and expert use of public domain historical art I don't tell you what else this is just a fantastic use of oversized tarot cards look ah this huge hand of cards you end up holding when they're so big it's just so fun to hold but also in a trick-taking game it is so important for everybody to immediately see the number and suit of card you played big cards make that so much easier and also when someone has to pick up a trick as they do all the time having big cards makes that act feel so much more portentous ah I absolutely love it although I will say out of which these two games to buy I've heard that tournament Avalon is the slightly better version but I've only played tournament that Camelot I would have liked to play both but then self-isolation happens so I've heard you should get Avalon but I'm here to say what a minute Camelot it's just a fantastic game as well so that's four of our five games covered I'll just pack this one away and then go for a little rummage to see if I can find them it's true what I say great card games are everywhere you just have to look for them the hype around the crew is just unreal at the time that I'm filming this it's almost completely out of stock but they might still have some copies available on Amazon de and then because the game is completely language-independent you can just read the rules at home or print them out this is another trick taking game but unlike tournament at Camelot and Avalon this is one where all players work together to win as a team if we just give the manual a little zero-g flip we'll see that it tells the story of you and your friends on a manned space flight and with the unfettered ambition of a student film maker it does this over 50 chapters each of which is a kind of different level with different rules but here's the catch I had to include the crew in our list of great card games that have come out recently but I've played it exactly once before they imposed self-isolation in the UK once is enough to let me know that this game lives up to the hype 100% it is as exciting and involving and and dramatic as everyone says it is it's tremendously clever but one play is absolutely not enough for me to feel confident stamping my opinions on it but here's what I'm gonna say instead there's a board game review site called no pun included who put out absolutely fabulous video reviews and they did an exhaustive 15 minute video recently covering exactly why this game is great and there is a link to that in the description of this video you know just to get a bit cheesy for a second with everything that's happening with coronavirus you know humans are gonna get through this with society and community so I dunno it just feels oddly fitting to end a video where I can't leave my home by leaning on another board game reviewer so there you have it five or technically six superb new card games every single which is going straight into my collection if you've enjoyed this video for whatever reason it's giving you something lovely and distracting in I'm gonna say the horrible words these trying times hey let me point you towards some other stuff we do you might not know it but the shut up and sit down podcast is on episode 106 now we work really hard on it so that's like at least 170 hours of bemused board game chat and I know previously you'd have been like when am I gonna find the time to listen to 160 hours if some British people talk about board games well who's laughing now I'm laughing now alone without as much to do as I'd like isolated in my flat alternatively if you're looking for more long-form video content up here that's our six or seven hour playthrough of a game of Twilight Imperium fourth edition some people apparently like to put it on in the background while they're doing their cleaning and down here this is a video that YouTube thinks is best for you YouTube really judging you with this bottom video where does YouTube get off goodbye everybody thanks for tuning

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 357,138

Rating: 4.9492106 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Card Games, Air Land & Sea, Bruxelles 1897, Mandala, Tournament at Camelot, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, find board games, best board games, top 10 board games, most popular games, most popular board games, best games, top 10, best board games 2020, hottest board games 2020, top board games 2020, Tournament at Avalon

Id: r0yjpbEhpm4

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/grandsuperior]

That skit in the stairway was hilarious.

I was skeptical of The Crew but it’s getting such glowing reviews everywhere. I may need to start taking a look at it.

[u/eruditebaboon]

There's only one game in this video that I want to hear about: HUNDREDS OF HORSES.

[u/UrQuanLord]

From the video, with timestamps (linked), the games are:

• Mandala - 00:54
• Bruxelles 1897 - 05:49
• Air, Land & Sea - 10:08
• Tournament at Camelot / Tournament at Avalon - 16:04
• The Crew - 21:57

[u/LonelyManBGs]

I want to be a German subsistence farmer.

[u/ToTheTableGaming]

I don't know, maybe this is just me, but I feel like I connect far more with Quinn's videos these days. Not to knock Matt or Tom (who are obviously very talented), but I just feel like Quinn's love of the hobby comes through more, and in his videos, the games are the centerpiece, given their chance to shine.

In contrast, the Matt/Tom videos lately have felt like very well produced board game related entertainment pieces lately (rather than reviews), I very rarely leave their videos with an understanding of how a game works or what I might like or dislike about it, just their overall impressions/conclusions.

[u/aaaaaabi]

Bruxelles 1897 is great, I am so surprised how much it was able to capture from the full board game. The card game revolves around probably the most interesting part of the board game which is the action selection in which you are making mulitple decisions each time you place a card/worker down. On a single turn you are selecting an action, putting out a bid amount (for end of round bonuses), and looking to score points from a sort of area control. Great game, I only wish the art was as good as the original board game.

Love Tournament at Camelot too and always happy to see it get love, it's superb fun whenever it hits the table.

[u/Squirrelhenge]

Really pleased to see Air, Land & Sea on here! Played it at my FLGS game night a couple of months ago and it was fantastic -- so much game in so few cards!

[u/KingMaple]

How on earth does everyone have Tournament at Avalon!? It is not available anywhere in US nor EU, yet there are so many videos and blogs and podcasts talking about it.

[u/HastyRoman]

Get ready for all of these to sell out in a day