Card games that don't have random deck draws

[OgreBattle]

Are there any card games out there that don't have you draw cards from a shuffled deck, but just start with the cards on hand (or on the table and so on)?

[Sam]

Using a shuffled deck is the reason to have cards in your game at all. Shuffling gives you randomness without dice.

Games that don't need to shuffle will use tiles, because of production costs. Maybe something like In the Year of the Dragon?

[Foxwarrior]

Theoretically, one could get somewhere by having players arrange their decks in advance as some sort of unusual twist on the deckbuilding paradigm, but it's sure to take a long time before each game.

I have not seen any implementations of such a system.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Are there any card games out there that don't have you draw cards from a shuffled deck, but just start with the cards on hand (or on the table and so on)?

4E D&D.

No, seriously, 4E D&D. If you're not shuffling through a deck and can just decide what cards you have on hand, cards are just a way to organize your sets of options.

[Laertes]

Back in the day I used to play a lot of Lord of the Rings CCG. It was enjoyable and I'm a huge Tolkien geek. (I might do an OSSR of it someday.) We experimented with stacked-deck play like in Foxwarrior's suggestion.

The thing about stacked deck play is that you are taking risks because the more you stack your deck the more utterly you will be boned as soon as things stop going to plan. Instead of getting exactly the card you need, you'll get the card you need next turn, which means your hand is always gummed and you can't do anything. Not a success.

[Foxwarrior]

I think that if one is designing a card game for stacked deck play, one should think carefully about how RoboRally achieves its hilarious calamities.

[ishy]

Do board games that use cards for action resolution count?

[OgreBattle]

Do board games that use cards for action resolution count?

If it's still more card-focused than board-focused, yeah. Take that as you will. Dice are also fine. So in that sense 4e is like a card game.

[ishy]

Well at home I have a small board game. It's similar to stratego.
Two player game.
Set in LoTR setting. You're either the good or the bad side. And have 9 special units, each with a different attack rating and perhaps specials (like say boromir has a both sides lose special).
You both get a hand full off cards, 1-9 or something (not 100% sure) + some specials.

'Combat' is resolved by whoever has the higher attack (creature + card) or special.
So basically you're playing that poison princess bride scene over and over, guessing what your opponent does and countering that (tossing your weak cards when they don't matter etc).

[fectin]

A lot of games do this in a minor way by setting aside some sort of card. The more recent LOTR game, for example, sets aside all the locations at the start of the game. If you reveal a new location, you always know what it will be.

L5R had something similar with one of the monk strongholds (temples of the crow?) where you pulled all the rings out of your deck, stuck them under the stronghold, then played them whenever you met their play conditions (iirc). There was another stronghold that did something similar for personalities, but I don't recall the details (I think it was a dragon stronghold). Similarly, warlords starts with six cards in play. Those are usually set aside as part of deckbuilding, but they all have to be legal anyway, and nothing prevents you from choosing a different set each game.

Various games include ways to play cards from your discard pile, which simulates picking your next card, or to search your deck directly ("tutoring" in MtG).

[Kaelik]

I have a Westereos board game that you start with all your hero cards in your hand. You have seven that are unique to your faction. Each combat you must play a hero, and when you run out of cards you just pick up your hand again.

So the cards are all available to you at first, and it is just making the decision when to play each card. All of them have different combat values and different specials, such as more causualties on a win, or fewer on a loss, or the ability to move the army a second time if you win with this hero, or negating the enemy hero's combat power, or drawing a token or promoting a unit.

The point being, you have cards instead of tokens when you have a fairly large amount of information you want to store on each choice.

[Laertes]

I've played that, Kaelik - raiding is OP but arguably that's from the source material.

Re cards: I think they're most useful when you only need a subset of them at any one time. Just as a form of reference document, they're a very useful means of summarising anything where you won't need to hold more than a part of it at any one time. I can see people making cards for D&D 3E spells, for example, as a way of showing memorisation.

[fectin]

@Ogerbattle
Are you distinguishing between card and board games?

[OgreBattle]

@Ogerbattle
Are you distinguishing between card and board games?

If there's a pure cardgame that does so is what I'm most interested in, but since there's very few examples of that I'll also take board games. Like the Game of Thrones boardgame that uses a hand of 7 numbered cards (with some special powers) instead of die rolling to resolve affects, that's a great example.

[fectin]

That's a good point - the Game of Thrones CCG also has a deck that you select a card from each turn, and I think you select starting characters (it's been a decade since I played).

[lowbeyonder]

Mage Wars might be what you're looking for. It's a card-based board game where your deck is a non-randomized "spellbook" and during the prep phase of each turn, you select two (or more with bonuses) spells from it that are the only cards you have access to that turn.

It's pretty fun.

[OgreBattle]

Mage Wars might be what you're looking for. It's a card-based board game where your deck is a non-randomized "spellbook" and during the prep phase of each turn, you select two (or more with bonuses) spells from it that are the only cards you have access to that turn.

It's pretty fun.

Checkin' it out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngrBijqKjwY
thanks! I've been prototyping a card game and was thinking a lot about how to represent a grid or 'combat zones', seeing Mage War will be very informative for me.

[Josh_Kablack]

Are there any card games out there that don't have you draw cards from a shuffled deck, but just start with the cards on hand (or on the table and so on)?

Yes.

In Concentration all cards start face down on the table. But they were placed there in an unknown and presumably random order.

52 Pickup starts with all cards in hand and has no random draw, as the entire game consists of dropping and then recovering the cards.

Get Bit uses cards as a means of making hidden moves instead of as a randomizer, so all players start with all numbered cards in their hands.

Seasons starts with a drafting phase where players take turns drafting cards from a spell deck and then split the cards they drafted into three sets of three. Of course Seasons uses a bunch of other randomizers during the play of the game.


And not quite as close to what you ask for is 7 Wonders which does have initial shuffling in the setup phase but then each Age's cards start in all players hands for the central draft-and-pass mechanic.

And if you want to go really really far astray into a purely hypothetical game design point, Witch Trial, Morels and doubtless some other games have cards that are randomized, but then not drawn directly, as they are placed faced up into a lineup where players can expend more resources to snag a more recently revealed card.