Best Deck Building Games

For the beginners wanting their first deck-building journey: Dominion is a staple starter board game with a steady growth of depth and complexity as you build cards. As the 2nd Edition of the original Dominion — which helped start the deck-building genre — every card has beautiful artwork with game rules streamlined better for less confusion.

Within a minimum of 30 minutes of playtime, you can play between two to four players as monarchs hoping to create a vast kingdom with immense resources or as people opposed to the sad collection of wealth at the start of the game. Regardless of experience with deck-building board games, you can’t go wrong with trying out Dominion because of its solid and slowly addictive design. 

The next game is Ascension: Realms Unraveled, a deck-building board game with a multi-faction-based design where cards can belong to more than one faction – unlocking vast combinations of powers and abilities. This version of Ascension is a self-contained base game but can combine with other base sets within this board game line to expand on your ongoing playthroughs.

While multi-faction cards are the main feature in Realms Unraveled, players will garner huge rewards when playing cards from the same faction in a single turn. Also, with the transform mechanic from past iterations, permanently upgrading cards can make them more powerful – making encounters between two to four players competitive and fresh for 30-45 minute gaming sessions.