Card Game

In Yardmaster Express, two to five players compete to have the highest valued train after a set number of rounds. The game starts with the first player drafting a Railcar card from his hand, attaching it to his train, then passing the rest of his hand to the player to his left. This draft continues until all players have added one Railcar to their train for each round of the game. The trick is, while each new Railcar must match the resource type or value of the one previously played, players always have the option to play any card face down as a Wild Railcar; the Wild Railcars don't have much value, but they can be used to save a player in a bind or to thwart your opponents by "hiding" a card they need.

Yardmaster Express plays in ten minutes and consists of just 32 cards (no tokens, no cargo cards).

Backyard Builders Treehouse — released in the France as Way Up High — is a reimplementation of Yardmaster Express with players now trying to climb vertically to build a treehouse instead of adding cars to their train engine.

From the publisher:
It's FUN- times 3 -when you play this exciting family card game! Match three of your playing cards to a "Triplet" card. And don't forget...Jokers are WILD! Be the first to collect four groups of matching cards and you win the game! With a little strategy and the luck of the draw, you could score a TRIPLE FOUR! It's three times the fun for the whole family.

IMPORTANT: Superfight went through a major reprint in late 2014. The rules and about 30% of the cards were refined to improve the game after it sold out of the first five prints in preorders alone. The game is now produced by the folks who created The Walking Dead, and is exploding in popularity. The CAH/Apples mechanic has been replaced by a table vote and one-one one battles, but the battle royale and villain rule sets keep the old single-judge mechanic if the table prefers that.

Superfight is party game of super powers and super problems.

The game is all about arguing with your friends about ridiculous fights.

The core deck contains 500 cards. 170 characters (white cards), and 330 powers and weaknesses (black cards). Players use a hand of three white cards and three black cards, and choose one of each to beat the player next to them. Then they get a random black card before fighting. Players then argue their case for why they should win, and the table votes.

From the creators of Cyanide & Happiness comes a card game where players compete to finish an awful comic strip.

The creators said:

"Someone on the Internet once told us that making stick figure comics is easy as hell, and that we were ugly and stupid.

They were right on all counts. So, after crying for a few hours, we created the Random Comic Generator which since its inception in 2014 has entertained millions with its computer-generated comedy.

After a few weeks of playing with the Random Comic Generator, we started to wonder if its hundreds of random panels might lend themselves to a card game, where you compete against your friends to finish a comic with a funny punchline. So we printed out all of the RCG panels and started playing with them."

Draw 7 cards. The deck plays the first card, select a Judge to play the second, then everyone selects a third card to create a three panel comic strip. The Judge picks a winner.

The game includes a deck of 250 unique panel cards - that’s 15.4 million combinations of comics!

In Citadels, players take on new roles each round to represent characters they hire in order to help them acquire gold and erect buildings. The game ends at the close of a round in which a player erects their eighth building. Players then tally their points, and the player with the highest score wins.

Players start the game with a number of building cards in their hand; buildings come in five colors, with the purple buildings typically having a special ability and the other colored buildings providing a benefit when you play particular characters. At the start of each round, the player who was king the previous round discards one of the eight character cards at random, chooses one, then passes the cards to the next player, etc. until each player has secretly chosen a character. Each character has a special ability, and the usefulness of any character depends upon your situation, and that of your opponents. The characters then carry out their actions in numerical order: the assassin eliminating another character for the round, the thief stealing all gold from another character, the wizard swapping building cards with another player, the warlord optionally destroys a building in play, and so on.

On a turn, a player earns two or more gold (or draws two building cards then discards one), then optionally constructs one building (or up to three if playing the architect this round). Buildings cost gold equal to the number of symbols on them, and each building is worth a certain number of points. In addition to points from buildings, at the end of the game a player scores bonus points for having eight buildings or buildings of all five colors.

The 2016 edition of Citadels includes twenty-seven characters — eight from the original Citadels, ten from the Dark City expansion, and nine new ones — along with thirty unique building districts, and the rulebook includes six preset lists of characters and districts beyond the starter list, each crafted to encourage a different style and intensity of gameplay.