Deck-Building Board Games: How They Work and Some of My Favorites

Deck-building games are one of the most popular mechanics in modern board games. In these games, players start with a small deck of basic cards and gradually improve it during the game, creating more powerful combinations and strategies.

What Is a Deck-Building Game?

One of my favourite mechanics in board games is deck-building. I love deck-building games because they involve building an engine that gets more and more powerful, and there is usually a balancing act between building the engine and then running it to achieve whatever the goal of the game is.

Each turn you reveal cards and decide what to do with them, while trying to achieve some goal that differs from game to game. This is an overview of what deck-building games involve, and a closer look at a few of my favourites.

A deck-building game is a card game in which players start with a small deck of slightly useful cards and add better cards to it as the game progresses, building a stronger and stronger deck. Usually, each player starts with an identical deck, typically of about 10 cards. Each turn you deal a hand of (typically) 5 cards from the top of your deck. As you play cards, they may give you a variety of benefits:

• Currency with which you can buy new cards from an available market
• Victory points
• Various abilities that help you within the game (e.g., movement or fighting strength)
• Ability to draw extra cards from your deck into your hand this turn
• Ability to trash a card from your hand (remove it permanently from your deck and the game)

Trashing weaker cards helps your stronger cards appear more frequently.

In some deck-builders, cards may combine based on matching attributes (such as suits or factions) to provide additional benefits, encouraging players to focus on certain strategies.

Played cards and newly purchased cards usually go into your discard pile. When your deck contains fewer cards than needed for your next hand, you shuffle the discard pile to form a new deck.

Dominion is generally recognized as the first deck-builder, and most other games build on the mechanics it introduced. Dominion has many expansions that add variety and replayability. Later deck-builders often add additional gameplay elements, such as a board with objectives, area control, or racing mechanics.

My Favourite Deck-Building Games

Here are some of my favorite deck-building games and what I enjoy about each of them.

The Quest for El Dorado

(7 plays, base game only)

Designer: Reiner Knizia
Artist: Vincent Dutrait
Publisher: Ravensburger

The Quest for El Dorado is a deck-builder that is a race through varying terrain (jungles, cities and water). Your starting hand gives you cards that offer a little money for buying new cards, and a little movement across each type of terrain. Each player has a meeple on the map, and players can get in each other’s way and block movement at times. The ability to trash cards from your hand is very limited in this game. The market is fixed, and initially you are limited to a small selection of card types (a few copies of each). As each pile is emptied, the next purchase has the option of bringing down a new type of card into the active market.

The game board is modular, with several board pieces that can be arranged in many different ways to create a different race each game. The rulebook suggests several well-tested arrangements, and the community has created many more.

I love The Quest for El Dorado because there is a delicate balance between gathering money cards to buy better cards later and simply racing across the map. I’ve had games where I fell behind because I focused too much on building wealth while others improved their movement. But then I bought some powerful cards and caught up right at the end to win.

There is enough interaction between players—competition for certain cards, racing to collect tokens at mines that grant bonuses, and occasional blocking—without too much direct conflict. It’s fun, relatively quick, and the games are usually close and exciting.

There are several expansions available that I have not yet explored. Unfortunately, multiple versions of the base game use different card sizes, which makes it difficult to match expansions in some regions.

I have also 3D-printed an insert that keeps the components organized, speeds up setup, and helps manage the card market during play.

The 3d-printed insert organizes the game nicely, with each player’s starting components in player-coloured boxes.

The Quest for El Dorado set up for 3 players

Trains

(3 plays, including the Rising Sun expansion)

Designer: Hisashi Hayashi
Artist: Ryo Nyamo
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group

Trains is often described as the deck-builder most similar to Dominion in terms of card mechanics. The game adds a board representing areas in Japan, where players build stations in cities and connect them with train networks. Victory points come from both what you build on the board and the cards in your deck.

Both the base game and the available expansions offer a huge number of types of cards, and each game you choose a subset of them to include in the game. This results in a huge amount of variability and replayability. The base game and the Rising Sun expansion (which can also be played as a standalone game) each include a double-sided game board, and there are also additional maps available online, some released as promos by AEG, and others contributed by the community.

I really like Trains for the huge variety of cards available, the tension between gathering wealth and victory points in your hand versus building out your network on the board, and the opportunities for combining cards in your hand to pull off some big turns. One potential weakness is that I think it’s possible to win the game without doing anything at all on the board, by focussing on buying cards that provide lots of money, and then using that money to buy cards that yield victory points.

I managed to fit all the cards (more than 1,000!) from both the base game and the Rising Sun expansion into the base game box, whose insert has room for everything. I have also 3d-printed some small train track pieces to replace the cubes that came with the game, and a box per player colour to store each player’s components.

The insert that came with the game holds all the cards for both the base game and the Rising Sun expansion. I 3d-printed the white box for station tokens and the coloured boxes for each player’s components.

Trains ready to play for 3 players.

Paperback

(24 plays, 10th Anniversary Edition with Unabridged expansion)

Designers: Tim Fowers, Skye Larsen
Artists: Jose David Lanza Cebrian, Ryan Goldsberry
Publisher: Fowers Games

Paperback combines deck-building with word-building. Each card represents a letter of the alphabet, and players form words using the cards in their hands.

Only the letters used in the word activate their abilities, which may:

• Generate money to buy new cards
• Increase the value of other letters in the word
• Trash cards from your hand or the market
• Allow you to draw extra cards next turn

Some cards are wild, making it easier to make a word. The market (called the offer) is organized by the price of each card, with a few available at each price point at all times, but otherwise randomly revealed. Some cards have a pair of letters on them (e.g., TH, NG) making it easier to make longer words. Some of the most powerful cards are rare, harder-to-use letters, making it tough to use them together in a word. Some of the cards in the market give you victory points, but are otherwise less useful in making powerful words. There is the common balance between building a deck that gives you lots of buying power and collecting victory points. This used to be a favourite of my wife and me, except it has a bit of a runaway leader problem, resulting in not enough close games. There are also a few cards that we feel are over-powered, that we typically remove from the game. Still, I recently bought the 10th Anniversary edition that has new artwork, nice neoprene game mats to organize the cards on the table and upgraded components for some optional more advanced modules (that I have not explored yet). I also have the Unabridged expansion that adds a bunch of new types of cards to add more variety and a few twists.

Paperback set up for 2 players

My wife and I love word games, and the combination of words with deck-building is fun. But this game has been mostly eclipsed by its sibling…

Hardback

(299 plays)

Designers: Jeff Beck, Tim Fowers
Artist: Ryan Goldsberry
Publisher: Fowers Games

Like Paperback, Hardback’s cards have letters on them, and each turn you’re forming a word using the cards in your hand. It’s a race to 60 points (“Prestige”), but there are some different things going on. Each card can give you money to buy new cards or Prestige points when played in a word. You can play a card face down to use it as a wild, but then you don’t get the benefits on the card. The cards in the market are in 4 suits or “genres”, and each suit offers some special abilities:

• Romance
• Mystery
• Adventure
• Horror

Many of the suited cards offer two layers of benefits separated by a horizontal line. The benefit above the line is always available when the card is played in a word; the benefit below the line kicks in only when there is another card in the word of the same genre. This leads each player to focus on one or two genres to increase their ability to play combos more often.

Most cards are laid out in Portrait (vertical) orientation, but there are some in Landscape (horizontal), called Timeless Classics. When you use one of these in a word, it stays in front of you after your turn, so you can use it again next turn, and benefit from its abilities even if it’s not used in your next word. An opponent can remove it and send it back to your discard pile only by using it in one of their words. They get none of the benefits of the card, but stop you from reusing it.

Each turn you make a word out of the cards in your hand, score the Prestige gained, and count the money generated. You can buy as many cards from the offer as you can afford; any unspent money can be used to buy ink. Ink can be spent in two ways: 1 ink can be used to draw an additional card on your turn, but that card must be used in the word you form. Alternately, you can trade in 3 ink tokens on your turn to get one additional cent to spend on that turn.

Ink remover (gained only from playing certain Horror cards) allows you to avoid using an inked letter in your word, or to turn it over to serve as a wild card.

The genres and combo opportunities afforded by them take Hardback a step further than Paperback, and I think that makes for a better game. It also seems to suffer less from runaway leader syndrome. My wife usually wins when we play; she tends to focus on the Adventure cards that yield the most Prestige points, while I accumulate cards with more effects & powers because that feels like more fun. And like many engine-building games, I tend to spend too much time building my engine while she races to victory.

Hardback set up for 2 players

Slay the Spire: The Board Game

(2 plays)

Designers: Gary Dworetsky, Anthony Giovannetti, Casey Yano
Artists: Bruce Brenneise, Jose David Lanza Cebrian, Anailis Dorta
Publisher: Contention Games

Slay the Spire: the Board Game is a cooperative deckbuilder. The game offers 4 asymmetric characters, each with their own separate card decks. Each player has a Starter deck, a large deck of Reward cards they can earn or sometimes buy, and a small deck of better “Rare” Reward cards. Each card can be upgraded to a better, more powerful version of itself by flipping it around in its sleeve. There are hundreds of cards.

In addition to those 12 character decks (3 per character), there are multiple decks of Encounters, Elite Encounters, Events and Summons (additional enemies called into a battle) for each pf the 3 Acts of the game. Add in the Relic, Potion, Boss Relic, Daze, Status and Curse decks, and we’re talking about 30 or so different piles of cards that come into play, though not all at once. That’s a lot, but it quickly all makes sense.

Slay the Spire: the Board Game is an adaptation of a solo video game. My stepson was interested because he had played the video game a lot. I haven’t played the video game but was interested because I like deckbuilding and the idea of a cooperative deckbuilder with asymmetric characters sounded cool. So, when he bought the game and asked if I wanted to play, I was in. So far, we have played twice. Our first game we lost in the boss battle at the end of Act I. Our second game resulted in victory after Act II, at which point we saved the state and packed the game away to resume later.

I like that the characters do feel different and their abilities complement each other. It’s interesting having the player turns be interleaved; we can play our cards in any order, and it’s interesting to figure out the best way to do that together. Since my stepson knows the video game, he would often offer advice based on that experience, but he wasn’t being an Alpha player in doing so.

After punching and sleeving to set up for the first play (which took a while), our first game took about 3 hours for the first act. The second game went quicker, but it’s still not a short game. It’s also a bit of a table hog with the game boards and all those decks. With 2 players it was fine. With 4 it might be a challenge to manage.

Slay the Spire: The Board Game set up for 2 players.

Clank!

(3 versions played once each)

Designer: Paul Dennen
Publisher: Dire Wolf

Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure is a dungeon-crawling, treasure-hunting deck-builder that I really want to like, but haven’t quite gotten there. There’s a game board with a dungeon map full of chambers & passageways. Your meeple is moving around, collecting treasure, avoiding danger, and trying to get back out before the dragon that lives there kills everyone. There are a few cards that are always available to buy (or to fight for a benefit), and a dynamic market that refreshes as cards are bought, or monsters defeated. Cards played from your hand can get you money to buy new cards, footsteps to let you move through the dungeon, and/or fighting strength to help you in battles. 

Some cards require you to add “clank” (cubes of your player colour) to a bag, and at certain points of the game those cubes are pulled out to inflict damage on the corresponding player, which can lead to elimination. Thematically, you’re making noise that awakens the dragon, who lashes out randomly.

I’ve played the original game as well as Clank! In Space (space theme instead of dungeon, and a modular board to improve replayability) and Clank!: Catacombs, in which tiles are turned over progressively to build the dungeon, so you don’t know in advance how it’s laid out. In each of my plays, I have found myself with limited ability to move around, and that has always led to a dismal finish for me. Part of that was probably a learning curve, but part was just bad luck, in terms of what cards were available for me to buy on my turn. As a result, I don’t really love these games. I want to, and I feel like I should, so I may give them another try.

Other Deck-Building Games

I’ve played each of these games only once each:

• Century: Spice Road: more engine building and resource management than real deck-building. Your cards let you make trades among various kinds of gems, which you will accumulate and then use to buy cards worth points.
• Shards of Infinity: the goal is to kill off all your opponents, while gaining mastery points that make your cards more powerful.
• Star Realms: space themed, with ships, bases, and the ability to attack other players.
• Tyrants of the Underdark: combines deck-building with area control.

Sort-of Deck-Builders

• Lost Ruins of Arnak (1 play): while there is a little deck-building in this game, it’s subordinate to the Worker Placement, Action Selection and racing aspects of the game. Each player starts with a small, basic deck to help them move around and buy things, but some players will focus more on buying cards than others.
• Heat (10 plays): not really a deck-building game, as your deck is fixed for any one game. When using the garage module, you’ll draft a few Upgrade cards to add to your deck, and in Championship mode there are additional opportunities to gain cards, but for the most part this game is a hand-management game with a fixed deck.
  

Bag-Builders and Related Games

• The Quacks of Quedlinburg, now known as just Quacks (14 plays), is like a deck-builder, but instead of a hand of cards you have a bag of chips (cardboard in the base game, but I highly recommend the Geek Up bits for the original edition, which replace the cardboard chips with pretty, noisy hard plastic chips; the Deluxe and All-In versions of the new edition comes with similar chips). On your turn you pull out chips until you either decide to stop, or go bust because you pulled out too many white chips. This push-your-luck element is key to the fun of the game. From round to round you buy new chips that make your bag more powerful.
• Dice Forge (1 play): instead of cards you have dice with replaceable faces, and instead of buying new cards you buy new dice faces to replace inferior ones on your dice. It’s fun to snap on the new dice faces and decide how to improve them.
• Typewriter (6 plays): Instead of cards you have plastic typewriter keys with letters on them, and some have special powers on the back. On your turn you form a word, apply any special powers you have available, and then flip the keys used over before your next turn. Like a deck-builder you have opportunities to acquire new keys to improve your pool of letters and powers.
  

Final Thoughts

Deck-building remains one of my favourite mechanics in board games. The process of building an engine and watching it grow stronger throughout the game is always satisfying.

Once you’ve played one deck-builder, the familiar mechanics make it easy to learn others. And many modern games add unique twists—boards, cooperative play, or new resource systems—that keep the genre fresh and exciting.

If you enjoy strategic card play and engine-building gameplay, deck-building games are well worth exploring.