My Top 15 Small Box Board and Card Games

I’ve been contemplating writing this list for years but couldn’t decide how to organize it or what to call it.  Suddenly I just decided to call it “Small Box Games” and generally include tabletop games in smaller boxes that play in an hour or less – card games, party games, and smaller scale strategy games all qualify.  Perfect for travel, pulling out when you don’t have time for the big stuff, or affordable gifts.  So without further ado, away we go!

Honorable Mentions: 6 Nimmt!, No Thanks, For Sale, Coup, Mr. Jack Pocket, Hanamikoji

15. Incan Gold

This is a great push-your-luck game with scales well from 2-8 players.  Everyone chooses whether they will go further into a temple or leave.  Then a card is flipped which will either reveal a trap or a certain number of gems.  Players in the temple split the gems which they get to keep if they leave.  Anyone still in the temple when the second trap of a certain kind is revealed runs in terror and loses everything.  You get five runs into the temple and whoever manages to cumulatively escape with the most gems is the winner.  Very simple, with only one decision (stay or leave?) so very accessible but fun to see just how far you can push it.

14. Archer: Once You Go Blackmail…

This simple card game is a retheme of the popular game Love Letter, which has a few new rules and a Hidden Identity card to guess.  Very easy gameplay in which you draw a card and play a card, with the goal being to either to drive all others out of the round or end the round with the highest card.  Lots of fun tricks to play on others and even some bluffing possibilities.  Very easy to pick up – good with non-gamers – and you don’t need to be familiar with or care for the cartoon to enjoy this one.

13.  Sleuth

A classic deduction game from American master Sid Sackson (designer of Acquire), Sleuth can best be described as “Clue without the roll and move BS.”  One gem card is hidden and players must deduce three characteristics of it – type, shape, and number.  They do this by using question cards to grill others about the gem cards they have in their hand and gradually reduce the possibilities of the hidden card until someone guesses it right (or everyone guesses it wrong).  A real brain-burner but perfect if you’re in the mood for some hardcore deduction.

12. Codenames

Another deduction game but lighter, with more of a party game bent.  Players are divided into two teams, with one person on each team being the clue giver and the others the guessers.  An array of word cards is laid out on the table and the clue givers are able to see a card that identifies which words belong to each team.  The clue givers must give one-word clues to the guessers who must guess their team’s words, with the complication being that the clue givers can offer words that (hopefully) link more than one word – but the guessers may accidentally guess the other team’s words or, worse, the deadly assassin card that makes them lose immediately.  Requires some thinking outside the box but lots of fun with the right crowd.

11. Machi Koro

This almost breaks the "small box" rule, but it's just a bunch of cards, coin tokens and a couple dice so I think it counts.  This is the perfect entry-level engine building game, where you roll a die Catan-style and the number can activate cards for both you and your opponents.  Then you use your money to buy more cards that will trigger more effects, to build up more money, to buy victory point cards.  A simple and satisfying loop that necessitates some on-the-fly strategy shifts.

10. Star Realms

Deck-building games burst onto the scene with 2008’s Dominion, with the idea of incorporating the deck-building meta aspect of a game like Magic: The Gathering into the actual flow of gameplay.  Despite their rabid popularity over the following few years, I never got really into them, perhaps because of the frequent shuffling required.  However, Star Realms got past my barrier.  It’s a 2-player deck building space combat game, where you build a deck of various spaceships and bases and then use them to try to wipe out your opponent before you they do the same to you.  The large deck of potential cards means you’ll never see the exact same cards from one game to another so you’ll have to adapt your strategies accordingly.  Quick and fun head-to-head action.

9. Great Heartland Hauling Co.

I admire this one for packing a lot of game in a small box.  This is an easy-to-grasp pick-up-and-deliver game where players are truckers across the heartland, transporting cargo such as pigs, cows or wheat and earning points for delivering goods to where they are demanded the most.  Gameplay is card-driven by drawing cards Ticket to Ride style and playing them to determine how far you can move on your turn and which goods you can load or unload.  The game also comes with a couple mini-expansions, so you get a lot of bang for your buck.

8. Bohnanza

Uwe Rosenberg’s bean trading game is a true classic, and had the courage to keep its German pun in its English production (bohn = bean).  The game features a mechanism that I, strangely, have never seen utilized in any other game – players cannot rearrange the order of the cards in their hand.  Playing from the front, they have to plant bean cards, draw and trade with other players with the hopes of collecting sets of planted beans (more of the same type = more points when harvested) and clearing out your hand through trading such that you only have to play the cards you actually want to.  One of the easiest, best trading games ever conceived, which keeps all players involved throughout.

7. Roll Through the Ages

There has been a small explosion of “roll and write” games lately, dice games that take the basic concept of Yahtzee but apply new rules to devise something different.  Roll Through the Ages, though, was one of the first roll and write spinoffs and, in my opinion, is still the best, as it’s also the world’s quickest civilization-building game.  Players roll dice that have as faces food, workers, goods, coins, or the dreaded disasters, and have three rolls to decide what dice they want to keep.  Then they use their dice results to buy improvements, build monuments, sells goods, and feed their people.  Great components including large wooden dice and solid pegboards to keep track of goods.  Few other games let you build a civ in half an hour.  Just watch out for the plague.

6. Wizard

Many card game designers have tried to put a spin on traditional trick-taking games like hearts, spades or pitch.  Wizard was the first of these games I played and remains my favorite.  The deck is similar to standard 52 card deck, but divided by color and number instead of suits and with 4 extra colorless cards – 4 wizards and 4 jesters.  Wizards beat everything else, and jesters lose to everything else.  Like many similar games, each round has a randomly selected trump color that beats others.  Before each round, each player must guess how many tricks they think they will win that round based on the cards in their hand.  Points are only scored if the player gets it exactly right – 20 points for b eing right plus 10 points for each trick won.  As in many trick-taking games, then, much of the strategy is in the betting/bidding – play it safe with a fairly low number, or go for broke and try to outpunch your hand’s weight?  However, coming out just right often requires some clever maneuvering mid-hand, and it’s always enjoyable trying to finagle things smoothly.

5. The Resistance

Of the spate of social deduction games that have flooded the hobby game market in recent years, The Resistance was one of the first (besides Werewolf) and I think remains the best (besides perhaps its successor, Resistance: Avalon, but I’ve never played it).  Players are divided into two teams, the resistance and spies.  The spies know each other are but the resistance doesn’t know who the spies are.  Players take turns selecting mission teams – team members can vote whether each mission succeeds or fails – if you’re loyal you have to vote success, but if you’re a spy you can vote either way (these vote cards are shuffled so you don’t know who voted for what).  Through this process, the resistance members attempt to figure out who the spies are, while the spies seek to remain incognito and sow discord and suspicion among the resistance.  The resistance has to succeed in 3 of 5 mission to win, which is tougher than it sounds.  This always ends up being a great time, though it’s maybe not for you if you can’t handle being wrongfully accused, which will almost assuredly happen.

4. Battle Line

One of the great Reiner Kinizia’s purest and best designs, this has some similarities with Lost Cities but in my opinion is the superior game due to slightly higher complexity and the agonizing decisions that result.  In this 2 player showdown, players take turns drawing and playing cards on either side of a line of pawns they are seeking to capture.  The goal is to place the best possible three-card formation on your side of each pawn – formations roughly correspond to three-card poker hands.  You capture a pawn if you can prove, through all cards that have been played, that what you played can’t be beaten by what the other player could play.  You win either by capturing 5 of the 9 pawns or 3 in a row.  Because you must play a card on every turn, you will often be forced to make suboptimal moves, so you’re always trying to make the best of a crappy situation to come out on top.  One of the best.

3. Asante

This 2-player game used to be known as Jambo, but for some reason changed its name in the more recent edition.  This is a tightly competitive game of card play and buy low, sell high.  You play cards to acquire goods, sell goods, manipulate your actions, and mess with your opponent.  Simply be the first player to reach 60 gold from the starting point of 20 to win.  Sounds easy, but it’s made more complex by the multitude of cards that come up and by the fact that you can only stock 6 goods at a time.  Not quite a fully fleshed out economic game, but it gives you a good feel of that in a tight, relatively quick package.

2. 7 Wonders: Duel

I played the original 7 Wonders several times and enjoyed it but it didn’t enthrall me.  I think this 2-player version is superior.  Players take turns drafting cards one at a time from a tableau and use them in various ways – to acquire resources, build buildings, acquire science, build up a military force, and, of course build wonders.  There are two ways in which a game can end immediately – either by winning the tug-of-war military struggle or acquiring one of each of the 6 types of science cards.  Failing that, the player who scores the most points through various scoring opportunities after 3 rounds wins.  Thus the game is usually a struggle to prevent the other person from achieving a sudden victory while building up your final point total.  I don’t quite consider this a civ-building game since there’s really no upkeep like feeding your people, but ti’s still quite rewarding to build a few wonders and come out on top.

1. Tichu

Hail to the king, baby.  I did have to think about it, but ultimately there’s no question that this partnership card game is still my favorite game in a small box.  A hybrid of trick taking, ladder climbing, and poker, you want to be the first player to go out of cards by playing combinations of cards that are successively higher than the last.  Best case scenario is if you and your partner go out first, but there are also points to score from certain cards and the ever-tempting “Tichu” bet that’s a bonus 100 points if you the first to go out and minus 100 if you’re not  Only 4 special cards distinguish the deck from a regular poker deck, but the dragon, phoenix, dog, and bird make all the difference in the world.  Although I don’t get to play it that often nowadays, I can’t deny how much fun I’ve had playing endless rounds of Tichu over the years, and it’ll always be the best.