There are great card games that combine on-the-fly strategy with preparation. Luck tends to play a role in these games, but it’s up to the player to create favorable circumstances.
Card games fall into three subgenres: traditional, trading, and virtual.
The console’s portability makes it perfect for quick sessions during travel and lengthy campaigns with unlimited breaks. Each game has different mechanics, but they are all solid in what they aim to achieve.
Luckily, Nintendo managed to add a great selection of card games to their console. In this article, we’ll be looking at the 16 best card games on Nintendo Switch.
Virtual Card Games
Slay the Spire
| Genre | Strategy, roguelike, fantasy, card game |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store or Amazon |
| Length | The main storyline takes around 12-13 hours to finish and a full, 100% completionist run will take you close to the 215 hour mark |
| Developer | Mega Crit Games |
| Release date | 6th June 2019 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Slay the Spire takes a few straightforward mechanics and adds a few twists to deliver a polished roguelike experience. You will find interesting enemy designs, challenging bosses, and unique cards.
Since it’s from an indie developer, players should not be surprised that Slay the Spire is incredibly exciting. The combination of deck building and rogue-like dungeon-crawling might not strike you as innovative. Still, it was put together well in this game.
The game has four characters, three of whom you must unlock by playing through the game, each with a unique set of cards.
As you learn and master the game, you’ll find out which cards synergize and bring out the best in each other.
Because of the game’s roguelike nature, you’ll have to create a build on the fly based on what cards and relics you get. As a result, the game is endlessly replayable.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
| Genre | Strategy, card game, RPG, fantasy, adventure |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | Main story takes roughly 27-28 hours to finish and a completionist run will take you close to 43 hours to finish |
| Developer | CD Projekt RED and CD Projekt |
| Release date | 28th January 2020 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the Switch’s greatest open-world games and features a card game named Gwent that would later become a full game.
Before that, The Witcher fans got a spin-off game called Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. It features an improved version of the Gwent seen in The Witcher 3.
Gwent is a strategic bluffing game where you must win two out of three rounds. You can only draw cards at the end of the round, which requires careful consideration for each unit played.
Between battles, players explore the Witcher universe from an isometric perspective, finding hidden treasures, puzzles, quests, and people to help on the journey.
Thronebreaker is more than a card game. It is an engaging RPG as well. There are choices with varying consequences that will change the story.
Monster Train First Class
| Genre | Strategy, card game, roguelike, fantasy |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | There isn’t currently any up-to-date data on how long this game takes to beat, but the random nature of the game makes it very replayable |
| Developer | Shiny Shoe LLC |
| Release date | 19th August 2021 |
| Co-op | Online, up to 8 players depending on game mode |
Monster Train is a deck-building game where players need to defend the last burning pyre from invading divine forces on a moving train. Combat takes place in three train compartments, with the fourth floor holding the pyre, which serves as the player’s health.
Players have to defend their pyre from each wave of enemies to progress. After each turn, enemies attack first, and surviving enemies ascend one floor.
Once players master the game, they can increase its difficulty and earn higher ranks.
The game generates a random set of enemies and events for each playthrough, making it unique. There are 25 difficulty levels and a true boss that you can access once you’ve overcome the game’s many difficulty modes.
This might be a good choice for players who like the idea of using cards to summon units, cast spells, and place artifacts. The game is challenging and requires strategic deck building with lots of room for player skill, planning, and optimization.
If that’s your thing, give this game a go.
SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech
| Genre | Strategy, card game, RPG, steampunk, fantasy |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store or Amazon |
| Length | The main campaign takes around 15 hours to beat and a full, 100% completionist run will take you just over 29 hours |
| Developer | Image & Form Games |
| Release date | 25th April 2019 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech is a steampunk RPG on Nintendo Switch, where you control a team of five robots and have to stop the evil Void army.
Before combat, you have to choose three playable characters for your team. Each character can bring up to eight unique cards, with their stats, equipment, and level affecting the potency of their effects.
The Heroic Chain mechanic rewards playing three cards of the same character in one round with a unique fourth card, while the Tag Team Combo mechanic grants extra effects for matching team member cards.
To succeed, you must balance out your party’s elemental damage and consider status effects, resistances, and weaknesses.
Swapping around characters and switching cards is part of the fun of Steamworld Quest. You can choose to dedicate party members as defensive supports, healers, damage dealers, or a healthy mix of all.
Griftlands
| Genre | Strategy, card game, deck-building, RPG, story-rich, roguelike |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main story takes roughly 11-12 hours to finish and completing everything in the game will take you close to 30 hours overall |
| Developer | Klei Entertainment |
| Release date | 4th June 2021 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Griftlands seamlessly combines various gameplay elements to deliver a cohesive narrative through the eyes of three playable characters. This card game stands out by blending the best bits of visual novels, immersive sims, science-fiction RPGs, and roguelite deck-builders.
The game’s battle system is primarily card-based and features two main mechanics: combat and negotiation.
In combat, players use cards to attack their enemies, while in negotiation, they deploy cards as arguments or threats. The choices players make during battles can have far-reaching consequences, including affecting their reputation in the game.
Reputation plays a significant role in Griftlands. It influences how factions and characters interact with players, making it essential to avoid notoriety and making too many enemies.
Griftlands makes upgrading cards a seamless and integral part of gameplay. Players can visit shops to enhance their cards and even purchase pets to help them in battle.
Cardpocalypse
| Genre | Strategy, story-rich, card game, funny |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main story takes around 12 hours to finish and a full, 100% completionist run takes close to 25 hours all in all |
| Developer | Gambrinous |
| Release date | 12th December 2019 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Cardpocalypse lets you relive, or experience for the first time, how childhood was back in the 90s. In this game, you are an elementary school student who is hooked on the popular TV show and card game Mega Mutant Power Pets.
Unfortunately, your school has banned the game, so you’re forced to play secretly.
In this story-driven role-playing game, the characters from the TV show come to life, and you must battle both your friends and monsters to progress.
The core of the game focuses on the combat between champions. You must reduce your opponent’s champion’s health while simultaneously protecting yours.
In order to summon minions and other cards, players must use food. This resource refreshes and increases by one point every turn, allowing you to call bigger and more powerful cards each turn. These cards are often humorous animal-based puns.
When a champion’s health reaches half, they transform into their mega-state, providing them with new abilities that can shift the game’s balance.
Nowhere Prophet
| Genre | Strategy, survival, card game, roguelike, turn-based |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main story takes around 6-7 hours to finish and a full, 100% completionist run takes about 18 hours to complete |
| Developer | Sharkbomb Studios and Sharkbomb Studios GbR |
| Release date | 30th July 2020 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Nowhere Prophet can be challenging, but if you stick with it, you’ll discover one of the best card game experiences that you can get on Nintendo Switch.
The game allows you to choose between various religious prophets to lead your followers on a perilous journey through the Soma desert toward the Crypt, while facing danger from other survivors along the way.
In combat, you’ll use two separate decks; the Leader Deck, which relies on your Prophet’s abilities, and the Convoy Deck, representing each of your individual followers.
As you fight, positioning your cards on a grid of columns and rows is crucial, as you aim to bring down the opposing leader’s health by leading and supporting your followers.
Out of combat, you’ll guide your convoy through various locations and events represented by nodes. Moving around the overworld costs food and hope, adding a survival element to the game. Exploring the overworld to scavenge for gear, supplies, and new followers is crucial to succeeding.
Cultist Simulator
| Genre | Strategy, simulation, card game, puzzle |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main story takes around 19 hours to finish and a completionist run will take you 69-70 hours to finish |
| Developer | Weather Factory and Playdigious S.A.S. |
| Release date | 1st February 2021 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Cultist Simulator is a strange game to describe and summarize. The game tells you there’s no tutorial, and half of the fun is discovering its mechanics.
The game has two groups of cards: cards and actions (also known as verbs). You must place action cards within cards to produce different effects. These effects can create more cards and even more action cards.
Your run’s win conditions depend on your character’s choice. You can achieve mundane and minor victory conditions like having a successful job and retiring, or more esoteric endings like realizing the endgame of your cult.
Following that trend, there are also many conditions that will make you lose the game. For example, you might fail to survive if you succumb to disease or starvation or get arrested if you can’t shake off the police.
Other losing conditions include going mad and even losing to another rival cult. You have to find out what works for you or explore all the possible scenarios in the game.
Meanwhile, the game will keep you entertained with its atmospheric music and stellar writing.
Roguebook
| Genre | Strategy, RPG, fantasy, card game, roguelite |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | Main story takes roughly 8-9 hours to complete and a 100% completionist run will take you close to the 40 hour mark |
| Developer | Arkham Entertainment S.A. |
| Release date | 21st April 2022 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Roguebook is a roguelite deck-builder with a fairytale aesthetic. In this card game, you control two legendary heroes and watch them grow stronger with each move.
Part of the fun is unlocking and testing different characters to see how they synergize. Also, the more you play a hero, the more you expand their pool of cards, which opens up more combos.
Your heroes are trapped inside a storybook, and you must guide them to escape. At first, the world map is not accessible. However, you can use a magic brush to reveal areas on the map and travel to access events and combat encounters.
To improve your deck, you can apply gems to your cards manually. These gems have various effects and are crucial for more challenging playthroughs.
After beating the game once, you unlock Epilogue levels that scale the game’s difficulty by adding modifiers. Increasing the difficulty level lets you earn more lore pages, which you can use to upgrade a hero’s stats.
Hand of Fate 2
| Genre | Strategy, dungeon crawler, card game, dark fantasy, RPG, roguelite |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main campaign takes close to 29 hours to finish and a full, 100% completionist run will take you close to the 110 hour mark |
| Developer | Defiant Development |
| Release date | 17th July 2018 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Hand of Fate 2 melds real-time RPG combat with roguelite deck-building mechanics. This game sometimes feels like playing a tabletop RPG with a great dungeon master.
You’ll face off against the mysterious Dealer, who takes on the roles of primary storyteller, card dealer, and board game master.
The game boasts 22 unique quests, each with its own objectives and rules. As you take on each quest, you’ll embody a character that suits that particular scenario and make choices that will lead to different adventures.
Rewards are offered in the form of cards that can help you progress in future adventures. You can get equipment to improve your character, survival resources, and even companions to support you in combat.
Combat is swift and dangerous; a single misstep can prove costly. The game’s campaigns are lengthy, and you must perform evasive maneuvers and parries accurately to avoid taking damage over time.
Hand of Fate 2’s incredible voice acting and stunning presentation make it an excellent game for players who seek an engaging RPG experience in bite-sized chunks.
Frost
| Genre | Strategy, survival, card game |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | Completing the game takes around 3 or 4 hours overall |
| Developer | Stage Clear Studios and Jerome Bodin |
| Release date | 19th July 2018 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Frost is a cold and punishing single-player survival game. You’ll have to lead a band of survivors to refuge through a frozen world plagued by a harsh snowstorm.
Firstly, the looming snowstorm “Frost” is hot on your survivor’s tails, represented on the top left corner of the screen. When the counter drops to zero, you and your survivors perish.
You have to outpace the lethal snowstorm by committing resources to travel through regions.
However, gathering these resources is the hard part, as you have to delegate your survivors to hunt and scavenge for them. These survivors can grow fatigued, injured, and even die.
You have to make sure to dedicate enough time for rest too.
Aside from that, there are random events that could potentially hurt your group if you don’t have the resources or the right hand to conquer it. Another hard choice is deciding between taking the damage yourself and risking losing the game, or sacrificing a survivor to take the fall.
Idea cards have powerful effects that can buy you precious time and save you resources. However, these cards are scarce so you have to think about when you’ll deploy them.
Monster Slayers
| Genre | Strategy, card game, roguelike, RPG, dungeon crawler |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main campaign takes around 8 hours to finish and a full, 100% completionist run will take you around 94-95 hours |
| Developer | Nerdook Productions and Stage Clear Studios |
| Release date | 5th April 2019 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Monster Slayers is a turn-based, dungeon-crawling RPG where you battle with cards. While the game is a little generic and doesn’t seek to innovate, it is still a fun game to play through.
There are six playable classes with distinct cards and playstyles. If you beat the final boss of the game, you’ll unlock a secondary class for that character.
For instance, you’ll have access to the Assassin class if you beat the game with the Rogue.
During combat, cards draw from your Action Points and Mana. You can increase these during the run by equipping better gear or leveling up by defeating monsters. Companions also alleviate the burden of the battle.
Persistent upgrades and gear make future runs a bit easier. You can even invest points into a permanent talent tree for your class. However, if you manage to beat the final boss, that character retires and takes their equipped gear along with them.
Found gear and items don’t carry over to the next run. Instead, you have to rely on your skill and a little luck to beat the final boss.
Iris and the Giant
| Genre | Strategy, card game, roguelike, dungeon crawler, turn-based |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | Main story takes around 5-6 hours to finish and completing every single thing in the game will take you just over 16 hours |
| Developer | Louis Riguad |
| Release date | 5th November 2020 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Iris and the Giant is a sincere tale about a woman battling her demons and attempting to overcome depression and anxiety. While it comes from a place of sadness, the game is ultimately about overcoming these hurdles.
At the start of the game, she’s dropped to the bottom of a mountain which separates the real world from her imagination. You have to help her defeat all the demons on the way to the peak.
Don’t expect to reach the peak on your first few tries. The game is punishing when you make a single mistake, and you’ll lose a lot of health.
However, through practice and earning powerful cards, you’ll be able to solve the almost puzzle-like approach to combat. It’s so satisfying to perfectly knock away hordes of enemies without taking a single hit.
After clearing out the enemies, you can ascend to higher levels.
There are optional hidden paths to take that could lead to better treasure, if you’re willing to take on a grueling combat encounter.
Finally, you can choose to bring Imaginary Friends to assist you during the run. While they do have helpful effects, they also have negative modifiers that may catch you off-guard.
Signs of the Sojourner
| Genre | Strategy, visual novel, card game, RPG, story-rich |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store |
| Length | The main story takes around 4 hours to finish and a completionist run will take you around 14 hours overall |
| Developer | Bromio, Echodog Games, and Echo Night Games, LLC |
| Release date | 18th March 2021 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Signs of the Sojourner is a special card game. This is one of those rare games that doesn’t focus on violence and instead has themes of self-discovery and meaningful relationships.
The developers describe the cards as representations of your voice. You’ll deploy your cards like a puzzle, with the ultimate goal of connecting to the person and bringing back an item.
You play as a traveling merchant who inherited a shop from your mother. The primary goal of the main character is to collect precious items and trinkets to keep the store afloat so you can stay with the caravan.
For such a peaceful game, it isn’t realistic to create a lasting bond with every single character. Sometimes, your deck just isn’t right for the conversation, or you don’t draw the right combination.
While the card-based gameplay is simple, it is a great metaphor for how we communicate in our day-to-day lives. It’s perfect for gamers of all experience levels.
Trading/Collectible Card Games
Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution
| Genre | Strategy, card game, simulation, anime |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store or Amazon |
| Length | The main story takes around 62 hours to complete and a full, 100% completionist run will take you about 145 hours |
| Developer | Other Ocean Interactive and Other Ocean Emeryville |
| Release date | 20th August 2019 |
| Co-op | Local wireless and online, 2 players supported |
Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist: Link Evolution is a treat for any fans of the series and card game. The game is absolutely full of content.
The lengthy story mode goes through every animated series, from the original adventure all the way to VRAINS, starring Yusaku Fujiki.
During duels, you’ll normally play as the protagonist, but there are also duels where you’ll play as other characters. For the campaign, you can choose to use the deck featured in the story, or use your custom-built deck.
Of course, you can duel other players locally or through Nintendo’s online service. Aside from regular duels, the Draft and Sealed formats also made it into the game.
Considering the sheer amount of content and clear love behind the development of this game, it’s clear that this is a great experience for Yu-Gi-Oh! fans.
Traditional Card Games
Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics
| Genre | Strategy, party, card game, sports, tabletop |
| Buy from | The official Nintendo store or Amazon |
| Length | Completing everything in the game will take you well over 50 hours |
| Developer | Nintendo and NDCube |
| Release date | 5th June 2020 |
| Co-op | No, single player only |
Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics does exactly what it says on the tin- it contains 51 traditional games from around the world. This is one of the best card games on Nintendo Switch to bring during parties, as there’s always a fun pick for everyone.
Clubhouse Games lets you play locally with your friends or even online with other players. You can also practice your favorite games, too.
Players are spoilt for choice with this game.
There’s Texas Hold ’em, Blackjack, President, Sevens, Takoyaki, Speed, Pig’s Tail, Solitaire, and War. Additionally, there’s a game called Last Card that plays exactly like Uno.
If you need a break from card games, there are more to choose from, including sports games, board games, variety games, party games, and even games from around the world, such as Shogi (Japanese chess) and Mahjong.
