Top 10 Deck Building Games

boardgamequest.com:

As the gaming hobby grows, so too do the mechanisms that make games run. Deck building is a tried game mechanism that has been around for a long time, to the point that it has become a genre of its own. I’ve long been a fan of deck building and it’s been a delight to see how it has grown over time and been implemented in newer games, while the core concept- each player having an individual deck to which cards are added or culled in order to make it stronger- remains a satisfying strategic exercise.

Limiting this list to only ten games was no easy endeavor as this is such a broad category. To help myself out, I’ve stuck to games that use what I’d consider true deck building such as we find in Dominion. Excluded are: deck construction where players create their deck before the game; bag building where tokens are collected and drawn from a bag; dice building where players have a personal pool of dice they’re refining throughout the game; and hand building where you do not draw from a deck, but have access to all your cards until you play them. Any one of those categories could be a list of its own!

With those caveats established, let’s dive in and explore!

Aeon’s End has several admirable qualities that rescue it from being just another deck builder. The random turn order mechanic means you have to adapt to the circumstances, while not shuffling your discard (instead it’s just flipped) allows you to plan ahead (unless you have a bad memory, like me). This game is great at facilitating discussion as players plot how to take on the baddies, which lends to a sense of teamwork and cooperation. I’ve played with most of the Aeon’s End content except Legacy and of those my favorite has been The New Age, followed by the base game, but getting any version to the table is a treat. Now if only it had something besides the rather generic defend-the-city-from-the-nameless fantasy theme.

This little-known little game is a clean design that couples deck building with push-your-luck.