The best card games on PC in 2024

Magic: The Gathering Arena is one of the best digital versions of Magic to date, and Magic is arguably the best paper card game around. Arena offers many of the gameplay possibilities and formats of classic Magic, one of the most popular trading card games, but with the sensory cues and lavish animations many newly converted CCG players have come to expect thanks to games like Hearthstone.

This gruelling deck building rouge-like has you scrambling up its titular spire – battling hordes of enemies as you go. Should you perish, you’ll find that the tower is a different place when you return, packed with different foes and obstacles. Whether or not that’ll work to your advantage, however, is another thing entirely. One thing it does allow you to do is experiment with different cards and chance upon various relics to give your deck a jolt.

Monster Train is a deck building roguelike in the same vein as Slay The Spire. There are five demon clans to choose from, each with their own theme and playstyle; you choose two of these to form your deck with, one primary clan and one secondary clan. Hell has frozen over, and your job is to transport the last burning Pyre to the depths of hell, fighting heaven’s soldiers on your way. Your train has three floors, and the precious Pyre is at the top – you must defend it from attacking angels who move up a floor each round until you take them out, adding a tower defence element to each battle.

Between encounters, you can decide which way to steer your train, allowing you to take the path with the best bonuses for your strategy. You can also upgrade and duplicate your cards in search of a killer combo. There’s even a fast paced, real time competitive multiplayer if you’re up to the challenge.

Despite our mission to save our surrogate daughter – and the world, no less – in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the taverns and gambling tables on which the land’s favourite card game is played. It might have been pretty deep for an in-game distraction then, but the fully-fledged Gwent: The Witcher Card Game has swallowed our free time all over again

This free PC game is the ultimate CCG game for Sapkowski devotees, boasting many more spells, units, and special abilities than in Geralt’s third adventure. As a result, it’s going to take much more time to master as you take on friends in Gwent’s best-of-three rounds or get competitive in ranked or casual matches. You can never expect Gwent to boast the complexity of card games like Magic, but there’s still a lot of depth here.

Maintaining control over a kingdom is tricky. That said it is possible to satisfy the fickle whims of the people and keep them all in check, if you play your cards right. In Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, that’s not just true in a figurative sense. As Queen Meve of the twin kingdoms of Lyria and Rivia, you’ll be resisting the invading Nilfgaardian army through the medium of Gwent.

The cream of the crop, the top of the stack, and one of the friendliest free to play card games out there. This best card games list probably would not exist without Hearthstone as it jump-started the genre’s popularity after a few years of passive popularity and quickly became one of the most played games in the world.

But why is it so good? Simplicity, flow, and regular card expansions. Anybody can pick up and play Hearthstone and it will make sense to them. Maybe they will not wholly understand what they are doing or make the best tactical plays, but there is immediate pleasure in dragging your men around the sandy battlefield, watching them clash into each other and large, friendly numbers popping out. Thanks to this it will also run on pretty much anything, including tablets and phones.

Taking the majority of its visual and design cues from Hearthstone, The Elder Scrolls: Legends adds enough of its own systems and mechanics to eschew any accusations that it is just another clone of Blizzard’s immensely popular CCG. And anyway, what is so wrong about trying to emulate one of the best card games of all time?

The most notable difference is the addition of a lane system that splits the board right down the middle. The right-hand side lane (the Shadow Lane) offers concealment for a single turn, the left-hand lane (the Field Lane) has no effect. It sounds like an insignificant feature, but having to decide which lane to place a particular card in or start mounting an attack on adds a huge amount of depth to Legends. The concealment offered by the Shadow Lane, for example, offers protection for weaker cards who might otherwise instantly be wiped off the board.

If you ever thought the best card games were all rather similar then guess again, Ascension is a deck-builder rather than a card battler. But what, you may ask, is a deck-building game? Deck-builders are a subgenre of card games where each player starts with an identical deck and then a line-up of cards they can purchase using various resources generated by those starter cards. Those cards then go into their discard pile, which is shuffled into their deck whenever they run out of cards. You start each turn with five cards and discard any you do not use – usually that will not be any of them – at the end.

It is a completely different focus, moving the strategic deck-building portion of the game into the spotlight but keeping basic concerns like card sequencing and resource spending in place. Ascension is among the best card games on PC if you are the sort of person that likes playing combo decks with big single turns.

Power and runes are your two resources, runes letting you buy new cards for your deck and power allowing you to defeat monsters for victory points. Each card in your deck at the end of the game also has a value, but stacking your deck with crap will not be effective. Instead, it is about finding efficient ways to generate those resources, draw more cards from your deck and guarantee you are playing as many of your powerful cards every turn as possible. You might do this by keeping your deck small, or using cards that stay in play rather than being shuffled back in – there is a huge amount of variety and countless sets to mix and match the cards from.

Beautiful art, regular updates, and very fast games round it off as a great thing to waste a little time with. Yep, Ascension is one of the best card games out there, and one of the few deck-builders available on PC.

Many of the card games on this list revolve around mythical beings and beasts, but WW2 card game, Kards, is very different. The CCG by 1939 Games instead focuses on the conflict surrounding World War 2. You play as one of the nations involved, using tanks, planes, and artillery accurate to their resources, and battle against liveries of other players.

Nations have particular strengths corresponding with their real-life abilities in the 1940s, such as America’s production power exceeding that of other countries. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Kards outside of gameplay is the cards’ artwork.

While nominally a roguelike RPG, Griftlands uses cards in place of everything from speech skills and combat moves, to currency and character traits. As you explore Klei Entertainment’s raucously charismatic sci-fi world you’ll use diplomacy and combat cards to navigate bar brawls, roadside robberies, and tricky trades. You’ll gain new cards from every encounter, expanding your options going forward. Griftlands is currently in Steam Early Access.

Grey Alien Games has been mixing solitaire and card battlers with captivating results for a few years now, and Ancient Enemy is no different. The turn-based combat is mixed with solitaire puzzles, but there’s also a full skill tree and inventory system to ensure players can take any number of routes through the game’s scourge-ridden world.