It’s fast paced, incredibly easy to learn and – with four factions in the basic game – near endlessly replayable, with a superb amount of balance and variety. Players seek to reduce their opponent’s Influence total to zero while keeping their own afloat.
Starting with a fixed deck of ten cards, players take turns to buy new cards to add to their decks from a central marketplace, with money and attack power being added from cards played, then reset between turns. Star Realms is a deck building game in a small box, playable without any extra components at all – even scoring is cleverly handled by a couple of cards for each player. In our number one spot, we have what I consider to be just about one of the most perfect and well balanced, self contained two player card games of all time.
