The 10 Best Solo Card Games To Play By Yourself This Year

The best solo card games aren’t just for killing time. Instead, they’re a great way to experiment with exciting thematic gameplay, strategic deck building, and interesting tabletop narratives. With the ten single player card games on this list, you’ll won’t have to wait for someone else to take their turn. Instead, you can simply relax and play at your own pace.

10. Hostage Negotiator

Hostage Negotiator is a challenging game of conversational tactics in which you’ll be up against an anonymous villain with the aim of freeing at least half of the hostages he’s taken. Each round, you’ll have to reveal a new terror card that makes that objective difficult. You’ll also have to track and continuously reduce the threat level of the hostage taker’s attitude and actions. Each conversation card you play can potentially save lives.

9. One Deck Dungeon

If you’re a fan of the classic tabletop dungeon crawling experience, you’ll definitely want to give One Deck Dungeon a try. As you delve deeper into the dark, you’ll fight monsters, pick up items, and hopefully gather enough XP to level up your character and survive the final boss fight. While it all might sound simple enough, there are actually plenty of unique challenges within the game’s five dungeons, plus a bunch of skill and item combos that I found enjoyable to tinker with. 

8. Friday

Friday is a wickedly challenging solo card game that’s based on the classic novel Robinson Crusoe. Your goal is to help Robinson survive the island and defeat the pirates that arrive near the end of the game. You’ll have a mix of simple fighting cards to start with, and you’ll need to improve them if you want to win. In an interesting gameplay twist, you’ll soon discover that the best way to improve your deck is to avoid stepping between Robinson and the island’s hazards and instead let him take a few hits. Deliberately losing at the right time is essential to victory. 

7. Sprawlopolis

In Sprawlopolis, your aim is to build the best city possible by arranging residential, commercial, industrial, and park zones in a way that aligns with three of the game’s eighteen possible scoring parameters. These parameters represent the demands of the city’s planners. Sometimes you’ll score points for building parks in the city center. Other times you’ll be better off linking up roads to construct a highway. It’s amazing how much each game feels entirely different from the last.

6. The 7th Continent

Explore a vast landscape and lift the curse upon your character in The 7th Continent, a modern adventure card game for one to four players. The wilderness of the newly discovered continent is harsh, and before you can complete the objectives of your expedition, you’ll first need to survive. By crafting tools and finding shelter, you can continue your journey outwards and hopefully survive the threats that await you in the wild.

5. Dune Imperium: Uprising

In Dune Imperium, you’ll play as a leader of a Great House looking to conquer Arrakis and forge alliances with factions like the Fremen, the Empire, and the Bene Gesserit. You’ll start with a basic deck of cards and two agents that you can send out on missions. These missions will either increase your diplomatic standing or allow you to harvest resources like spice and solari. As you gather more persuasion, you’ll pick up more impactful cards for your deck. These will increase your power on the desert planet. 

4. Palm Island

If you’re looking for a smaller, more portable, single-player card game, then Palm Island is the perfect fit. In the box, you’ll find two decks of seventeen cards each. One is for you, and the other is for a potential second player. It’s your job to gather resources on your island, recruit villagers, and score the most victory points over the course of eight rounds. The solo mode is great, and if you do end up playing with two players, you can choose between either cooperative or competitive gameplay.

3. For Northwood!

Play tricks and strategically utilize the power of your allies in For Northwood!, an enjoyable little card game in which your aim is to unite an adorable kingdom of animals. There are twenty-four different rulers to match up against, sixteen challenge scenarios to work on, and a simple yet effective difficulty scaling system. To top it all off, the art establishes the perfect atmosphere and theme.

2. Marvel Champions: The Card Game

Marvel Champions is an immensely popular Living Card Game (LCG) that lets you assemble a team of superheroes and pit them against iconic villains from movies and comics. What if Black Panther and Professor X fought Loki? Or what if Peter Parker teamed up with Star-Lord to take down Dark Phoenix? The match-up possibilities in Marvel Champions feel endless. Since it’s a Living Card Game, you’ll always know what’s in every expansion before you buy it. There’s no rarity system and no risk of missing out on your favorite characters. 

1. Lord of the Rings: The Card Game

In Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, you’ll build a unique deck of heroes, allies, attachments, and events. Then, you’ll use your deck against a story encounter that takes place in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The core game’s three scenarios occur between the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, in and around Mirkwood. However, further expansions add more iconic characters to your pool of player cards and will transport you to realms like Moria, Gondor, and even Harad. The customization options available with a full collection are near limitless, and in my experience, building the deck and thinking about thematic combinations of card effects ends up being just as fun as actually playing a scenario.