I love card games, sit on a table, shuffle a deck of cards and have people gather around to play, what's not to love?
If there is one thing I truly love, is doing the most out of something, with the least amount of effort possible.
Card games is one of those things, I really enjoy card games, and I am always on the look out for games that are quick to explain and fun to play in groups.
My house is the gathering place for my friend group every weekend, most of the time, this is to play Nintendo Switch games, depending on the amount and the people there’s a couple choices I’ve mentioned before, such as Ember Knights for the hardcore group (like 3 guys), Ultimate Chicken Horse for the times where there are kids or newcomers, Super Smash Bros when they bring extra controllers and we can do more than 4 players, and plenty others, like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Party 3, etc. depending on the vibes.
A few months ago, on and off, I got into the rabbit hole of card games. During Christmas I also bought Exploding Kittens and played it a bit with family there, but it wasn’t that big of a hit. Once we got home, I couldn’t find it anywhere, I thought I left it in my grandma’s house and didn’t think much of it.
A couple weeks ago we finally found it and played it with my friends here, and it’s a total success! It’s a fun game and I got the version for up to 10 players, which gets quite crazy. The game itself is basically russian roulette with cards, and we’ve had a blast playing it.
Anyway, no matter how much fun that game gives us, a good session of tabletop gaming must have some variety, and I’m happy to say my previous research bore fruit!
What I always look for in card games is to be playable between with more than 4 people, since the group can be quite big most of the time.
All the games here are all-time classics, but they are quite unknown in my circle so, yeah I thought I’d share them anyway.
The first one is Spoons, and it’s a rather simple game where you put spoons in the center of a table (one less than the number of players), give 4 cards to each player, and take cards from the pile as fast as possible, giving one to the player next to you, until one gets 4 of a kind and takes a spoon, which makes it so everyone takes one as soon as possible, and eliminating the player who didn’t take a spoon. In our case we made it so we got eliminated after 3 strikes, and it was pretty fun!
Second was Cheat!, which wasn’t as successful, the point is to get rid of all your cards by playing them to a discard pile. All cards are played face down, so you can lie about the cards, but if the lie is exposed you have to take all the cards to your pile! I guess the speed of Spoons made it feel a bit slower and boring, although I kinda prefer the bluffing side of things. I guess I didn’t explain it very well in the moment either, maybe it’ll be more fun at another time.
Another game we played was Snap, this was a pretty fun game that requires quite a bit of skill reacting and observing the game. Every player has an unseen pile and deal one card at a time face up, if two piles at any point end up with the same card (suits don’t matter) you shout “Snap!” and acquire both piles. If you run out of cards you are out, until one player remains. This game was very fun and nerve-wracking, everyone is paying attention to every move so it was great to make people not use their phones when it’s not their turn. Yay!
Finally, we got into Egyptian Ratscrew, and that was a very fun time. It has tons of different rules and variations so you may as well just read the linked instructions instead of me explaining it here. I decided to slowly introduce rules that kept rising the stakes and making everyone much more focused in the game (and again, away from phones!), we had a couple of accidents when we slapped hands a bit too hard, but that’s to be expected on games like this.
So, yeah, the real reason I’m writing this is to ask you dear reader, what card games do you play with your family or friends? Let me know! I’ve been trying to find some trick-tacking games to play with bigger groups, I’ve seen Hearts and Oh Hell! but haven’t bothered to learn the rules properly and try them out, maybe next weekend.
