Over the course of four days in October, thousands of people flock to Essen in Germany to celebrate their love of tabletop gaming, playing and buying (and buying and buying) games from a vast array of new titles making their world debut at the fair each year. As publishers and players begin to prepare for SPIEL 2025, now is a great time to reflect on the games from SPIEL 2024 that have remained hot titles since their introduction there last year.
If I say ‘Tabletop Gaming’ you probably either think of pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, or conjure up in your mind the image of a big board in the middle of the table covered in wooden tokens, cardboard counters and plastic figures. There might even be some cards in there too, but you’re certainly less likely to immediately think of a card game. However, the same way board games have evolved a lot since Monopoly and Risk, the world of card games is now much bigger than the standard 52 deck of cards we’re all familiar with. Card games also hold several advantages: they are usually cheaper than bigger boxed games, making it easier to justify adding them to your collection; they are generally smaller and more portable; and because they are often easy to learn and quick to play, it’s often a simpler task to get them to the table in the first place.
One of the many Halls at SPIEL 2024
There is no better place to see a cross-section of modern card games than at SPIEL, the scale of which cannot be overestimated. SPIEL 2024 was no different, with 68,500 square meters of hall space occupied by 923 exhibitors from across the world. Some 204,000 attendees were able to sample over 1,500 new games over the course of the fair.
While many of the headline grabbing titles were more typical board games, the impact of the more humble card game should not be overlooked. The SPIEL 2024 games list on boardgamegeek.com categorised some 384 of the releases as ‘card games’. Now that some time has passed and these SPIEL releases have percolated their way through the gaming community to the shelves, pockets and gaming tables beyond Germany, we can take stock of some of the big hitters from the fair that have made a lasting impact, and that I would recommend you might want to consider picking up yourself.
Flip 7
While these are all new releases, some may seem familiar to you as they play on traditional card game mechanics — Flip 7, for example, feels a little like blackjack. On your turn, you have cards on the table in front of you and will either stick or twist/hit, hoping not to go bust. The important change here is that the goal and the ‘bust’ condition are completely different. The deck consists of twelve ‘12’ cards, eleven ‘11’s and so on down to one ‘1’, plus some special cards. The value of the cards in front of you is your score for the round, but if you ever get two cards with the same value you are out. So while a 12 and an 11 is great for scoring, you have a very high chance of going bust if you take another card. And although a collection of low cards wont score much initially, it increases the chances of you getting to the mythical seven cards in front of you. If you ‘Flip 7’ cards you get an extra 15 bonus points and end the round (and of course, you garner cheers and admiration from the rest of the table for your cojones). There are also special cards, some of which adjust your score, but the more in interesting ones give you an extra ‘life’, force a player to duck out of the round early, or make a player ‘Flip 3’. This latter card is great to play on other players to force them to take three cards in a row (making them likely to go bust), but occasionally it feels like the right thing to do is to really push your luck and play it on yourself.
The designers have self labelled the front of the box ‘The greatest card game of all time!’, and while this is more than a little hyperbolic, it is not totally unjustified. Of all the card games released at SPIEL, this soon became the most played and most purchased among the team here, and has remained so since.
:strip_icc()/pic8208422.png)
Seers Catalog
If you have ever played the classic card game President (maybe you know it as A✱hole), then you have played a ‘ladder climbing’ game. In these games, one player leads the trick by playing a ‘meld’ of cards made up of a run or set of matching cards, the next player must then beat the played meld by playing a better meld (often of the same number of cards), or pass. The goal of the game is usually to be the first player to get rid of all your cards. Seers Catalog is a great new twist on this mechanic, standing out from the crowd for two reasons. Firstly the presentation, which starts with a nice little pun on Sears Catalog and some linked 1960s style box art with a twist. The card design is also great with lots of references to Werewolves and magical Seers, combined with clean art and a pleasing colour palette. Secondly the gameplay. A small twist is the addition of special power cards that disrupt normal rules and gameplay. More impactful however, the simple ladder climbing mechanic is subverted by the end of round scoring. Ideally, you want to hold on to a high value card in your hand at the point another player ends the round by playing their final cards, but the more cards you have the more your score is reduced, and if you have too many you will score only negative points. This creates a delicious balance between playing your high cards to win tricks and keeping them in your hand for scoring, and of shedding your cards quickly, but not too quickly. Since picking this up at SPIEL it has made it back to the table several times and I think it will likely gaining playtime for a while yet to come.
Before we move away from classic card game mechanics, we need to mention the most well used mechanic there is – trick taking. One player leads with a card and the others then take in turns to play another single card to the trick, following or trumping the suit, highest card wins. There are numerous new twists on the trick taking game every year, and SPIEL 2024 was no different. Notable titles that we enjoyed included Bottle Imp, Fischen, Panda Spin, and Power Vacuum.
Agent Avenue
Card games often lend themselves well to team games of two vs two players, and a beautiful example of that is Agent Avenue. The theme is of anthropomorphic animals spying on each in other in 1950s suburbia, and the artwork is gorgeous. In the two player version you pick two cards to offer your opponent, one face up one face down. They pick one, you get the other. The cards either move your pawns round a circular track on the small central board until one wins by catching the other, or tick you towards sets of three cards that spell instant victory or instant defeat. The agony of which cards to put on the table face up or face down is nothing compared to the “I can clearly not choose the win in front of me” mental gymnastics you will do when choosing which card to pick. One might be terrible, but does that mean the face down one is even worse, or is it a double bluff and the face down card is actually amazing? While the game is great fun at two, it is even better with four. In your team of two, one of you must first decide, without discussing specifics with your partner (the other team are right there listening!) who will play a card face up, with the second player then forced to react with a suitable face down card from the limited selection in their hand. In the months since picking this up I don’t think I have ever sat down and played only one game of this, it’s just so compelling!.
Ito
Card games also have the ability to take a single deck and scale up to a multi-player party game. Ito does just that, accommodating up to 8 players co-operating together. First you will draw a category card, something like “Things you want to take a picture of” or “Best ever holiday”, then each player is secretly given a random card numbered between 1 and 100. On your turn you place your card face down on the table and try to give a clue to help put the card in the correct rank order relative to the cards the other players put down. For example, if the category was “Important life events” and you drew 91 you might say “Getting married” or if you drew 5 you might say “Brushing my teeth this morning”. Once all the cards are on the table the players discuss how to rank them based on the appropriate clue, and once agreed flip them over to see if you placed them in the right order. It’s a simple premise, but as you can see from the example questions, it usually generates some interesting discussion at worst, and some hilarious moments at best. It is so easy to teach, requires almost no table space, and a round can be played in just a few minutes. The perfect pocket game to take to the pub. One of the perks of SPIEL was picking this up early several months before it came to retail — unsurprisingly it sold out at the fair.
Castle Combo
Another card game that was so popular at SPIEL that it sold out was Castle Combo. A game about making combos in your castle, of course! More specifically, you are each building a 3 by 3 grid of cards, taking it in turn to choose and pay for a card from a common market of 6 on the table. Once you all have your 9 card ‘castle’ you calculate your score and declare a winner. Each card has a mediaeval character on it, but more importantly also has some kind of scoring mechanic. These are widely varied but might be: score 5 points if this card is on the top row, or score 2 points for every blue card beside this one, or score 6 for every card suit you don’t have in your castle at the end of the game. Some cards will also give benefits when you place them such as money to spend buying cards in future turns, or keys which are used to manipulate the common card market (and are worth points if unspent at the end of the game). The game rattles along at a satisfying pace with very little down time, and as the name implies there are plenty of ways to find combinations of cards that power each other up for maximum points. This game taps into that intrinsic joy of building combos such that even when you don’t win you usually feel like you achieved something.
Hopefully this snapshot of some of the hottest card games from SPIEL 2024 illustrates that games that come in small boxes can have as much impact as their bigger box cousins. Big games may grab the spotlight, but as SPIEL 2025 draws closer, we won’t forget to look for those surefire hits in smaller packages.