I’ve never really had a head for the art of deckbuilding. Back when I tried to playYu-Gi-Ohgrowing up, I just grabbed whatever monsters looked cool or had the biggest numbers and stacked them into a deck more double regulation size.
It was awful, truly. It’s for this reason I’ve always been a little wary of deckbuilding games, particularly those that are just digital versions of real card games. The last thing I want is to get into a card game on the surface level only to find out that it’s as deep as I can get.
Thankfully, the nice thing about video games is that they’re conceptually very broad. If you boil it down to its base components, a “deckbuilder” is just a game that involves collecting and utilizing a repeating resource, usually cards, but not always.
By broadening the scope a bit and simplifying mechanics, quite a few deckbuilders manage to be fun and accessible without beating you over the head with a phonebook of rules. If you’re looking for a good pick up and play deckbuilder, try these.
Peggle Never Truly Dies
I remember in the early 2000s when casual games like Peggle were the hottest thing on toast. Everyone wanted a piece of that pie for a little while until the interest eventually died down. I wonder, if Peggle had roguelite deckbuilding elements like Peglin, it might’ve staked an even deeper claim on the industry than it did.
Peglin is pretty clear in what it’s trying to do from the outset: it’s Peggle mashed up with an idle RPG with some deckbuilding thrown in the mix. You need to shoot your ball at pegs to rack up damage against the enemies on the top bar. When you win a fight, you canchoose new peg typesand relics that add effects and modifiers to your ball and playstyle.
Peglin is accessible for roughly the same reason Peggle is accessible: it’s that same dastardly simple concept of shooting a ball at pegs, but with the added wrinkle of more unique targets to strike and abilities to trigger. It’s everything that got people hooked on Peggle all those years ago multiplied by ten.
8Ballionaire
Somehow Less Overstimulating Than Pachinko
Ballionaire
If there are two things that a statistically significant portion of people enjoy, it’s wacky, flashy imagery and seeing numbers go up. Really, you could call that an attractive factor for video games in general, but especially in deckbuilders, andespeciallyin Ballionaire. Frankly, I take this game as good evidence that I should never set foot in a pachinko parlor, or I’ll go broke.
Ballionaire is kind of similar to Peglin, in that it’s all about dropping balls on pegs. The difference is that it’s not an RPG; the goal is to rack up as much cash as possible, and you do that by hitting as many different types of pegs as you can.
The deckbuilding part is that you choose which pegs go onto the board and where, and you get more peg types as you progress through the game that generate more cash and bounce the ball back.
There’s a degree of skill in launching the ball, but your placement of pegs and triggers is much more important. If you can stack the table with enough triggers, you’ll get to see a wonderfully chaotic fireworks show of flashing lights and scrolling numbers.
If You Know Poker, You Know Balatro
When I was being taught Poker, I was told that 50% of the game is learning how to read people and probabilities. That can be a difficult skill to pick up, but the other 50% is just knowing the different hands and catching them when they come out, which is substantially easier.
If you can justidentify a Poker hand on sight, you basically already have everything you need to play Balatro.
Part of Balatro’s near-universal appeal is the fact that it builds off a game that, statistically, a lot of people already know how to play. Even if you’ve only ever played Go Fish, you can still clock a pair on sight, and once you have that, everything else just sort of falls into place. It’s basic pattern recognition you’ve probably been doing since you were in kindergarten.
Once you have the Poker fundamentals loaded up, then it’s just a matter of finding and arranging Jokers. Something nice about Balatro is that the effects of Jokers and consumable cards are generally very short and concise, so they’re not hard to understand.
6Dicey Dungeons
It’s All In The Dice
Dicey Dungeons
Here’s a fun fact: the practice of rolling dice is believed to date as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, circa 6,000 B.C. Back then, they were made of sheep bones and used for telling fortunes rather than games, but the point is thatrolling a little thingy and getting a numberis a pretty universally-understood concept.
That’s part of what makesDicey Dungeonso easy to play.
Your two primary resources in Dicey Dungeons are dice and cards. You draw a few cards, you roll some dice, and you stick your dice on your cards to perform attacks and spells and whatnot. You need to set up your cards beforehand, which can feel a little intimidating, but the game does a good job of making synergizing easy.
10 Best Games To Play With Randomizers
Randomizers are a great way to squeeze more playtime out of great games, and these randomizers in particular are awesome shake-ups.
By basing everything around the roll of the dice, you can pretty much always get a good attack going, no matter what kinds of cards you load into your deck.
You still need to think about utility and coordinating, but substantially less so than in other deckbuilders. It’s not dissimilar to how I stacked cool-looking cards in my old Yu-Gi-Oh deck, except it actually works.
5Slay The Spire
Like A PVE Card Game
Slay the Spire
Part of what sours me about a lot of card games is that there always seems to be someone who’s better than me – someone who has better cards, understands the game better, and so on. Makes it feel hard to break in.
That’s what’s nice aboutSlay the Spire: you’re the only one with cards, so you don’t need to worry as much about counterpicking and mind games.
10 Games To Play If You Love Slay The Spire
If you need a break from Slay the Spire but are still craving similar games, check out this list to find a great similar experience.
Out of all the deckbuilders on this list, Slay the Spire is probably the most complicated, but it’s still far more accessible than something PVP focused.
The enemies you encounter in each stage use set attacks and abilities, rather than trying specifically to synergize and counter against all of your abilities. As long as your deck is logically sound, you won’t get stomped, at least not immediately.
Think of it kind of like playing Hearthstone against a training dummy. You stillneed cards that synergize well, and you need to understand the energy system, but you don’t need to worry about your opponent being leagues ahead of you on the learning curve.
4Luck Be A Landlord
Let The Slots Fall Where They May
Luck be a Landlord
Something I learned once when playing at a casino is that most slot machines don’t actually run on luck; they pay out in set intervals to keep you from winning too often. There’s no such thing as a “hot streak,” you just pulled the handle at the right time.
Kinda takes the fun out of it, but if you’d prefer a slot machine you have a little more direct agency in, you might like Luck be a Landlord.
Luck be a Landlord is a slot machine deckbuilder, strange as that sounds. Rather than cards or dice, what you’re accumulating are symbols to be placed on the reels of your slot machine. More symbols on your reels doesn’t just mean more opportunities for a payout, though; different symbols interact in different ways, delivering greater or lesser payouts or otherwise influencing how other symbols function.
Since the reels of a slot machine are inherently random, it’s all about building up as much potential synergy as possible in a set number of spins. It’s still kind of faithful to the mechanics of a slot machine, but you can also tilt the odds in your favor by grabbing the right symbols.
3Inscryption
So Simple, A Stoat Could Do It
Inscryption
Despite being a big fan of Daniel Mullins, I was initially a little wary ofInscryption, due largely to my aforementioned deckbuilding-incompatible brain.
However, much like everything else Mullins has ever made, this is part of an elaborate trick Inscryption played on me, and just another facet of what makes it such a clever game and metanarrative.
Inscryption appears to be a traditional roguelike deckbuilder at a glance, something you’re supposed to repeatedly bang your head against until you get good. In actuality, though, the gamewantsto be played, and gives you the resources to progress at fairly regular intervals, such as better cards and helpful items.
Granted, you need tosolve an occasional escape room puzzle, but that’s for a different part of your brain to figure out.
Even if you don’t consider yourself good at card games, the basic mechanics of Inscryption cards are relatively simple, and the game gives you enough time and breathing room to nail them down before it starts ramping up. Even when the game starts throwing curveball mechanics at you, it never deviates too far from those fundamentals.
2Dungeon Clawler
Get Yourself A Fistful
Dungeon Clawler
To my recollection, the only kind of claw grabber game I’ve ever won anything from is those little shovel-claw ones you’re supposed to get fistfuls of candy out of. It’s a good thing that’s the kind of claw game Dungeon Clawler is modeled on, because if it was the regular kind, I’d never get anywhere with it.
Dungeon Clawler’s deckbuilding element is centered around the various bits of junk you drop into your claw machine, from swords to shields to miscellaneous abilities.
On your turn, you try to grab as much stuff out of the machine as you may to build a sequence of attacks and actions. While the stuff you put on your machine does matter, it’s also important to have general skill with operating the claw, so you can grab large quantities of stuff.
Unlike in some deckbuilders where every turn is one and done, Dungeon Clawler is more about stacking effects and powerups alongside fighting. If you enjoy a good escalating DPS race, and I know I do, this game’s a blast.
1Lost In Random
Random Rules, But Stacked Decks Win
Lost in Random
Deckbuilding mechanics appear most typically in either roguelike gamesor PVP card battlers, but that doesn’t mean those are the only genres allowed to have them. It’s actually quite possible to incorporate them into a more traditional single-player adventure than you’d expect, at least if Lost in Random is any indication.
Lost in Random’s moment-to-moment exploration is focused more on dialogue and the occasional puzzle, but it’s all toward the greater purpose of preparing you for combat. In combat, you roll your die to get points, then spend those points on cards drawn from your deck to get weapons and abilities.
I find that Lost in Random is less like preparing for contingencies like in most deckbuilders, and more like building up an arsenal. You can stack your deck with strong, high-value cards, but that also means accepting you might be unarmed for long stretches in a fight.
For my playthrough, I had to get very good at dodging to keep my expensive cards viable while I gradually whittled down foes. Of course, you can also go for low-value cards for more frequent plays, if you don’t mind reduced damage.
10 Underrated Deckbuilders You Need to Play
Deckbuilders can be a hard genre to get into, but this list of underrated deckbuilders you need to play should help a little.
