Most mornings, I stumble out of bed, grab my phone, and crack open some Pokemon packs. Over the last month, I’ve been consumed by the routine of booting up Pokemon TCG Pocket, a mobile adaptation of the popular card game, and–much like the video games and show encourage–catching ’em all. I’ve blown through dozens of booster packs by now chasing the thrill of filling my digital library with rare holographic and full-art cards. I know for a fact I’m not alone in this craze, either. Group chats of mine are filled with friends sharing the rewards of their booster packs, and my social media feeds often consist of a handful of screenshots of someone’s haul. That’s not all that I’ve seen.
Everywhere I looked this year, some kind of card game was killing it and dominating conversations and minds. Balatro grabbed a hold of gamers early into the year and never particularly let go. My favorite part of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth wasn’t taking Tifa on a date or watching Nomura and company continue to reinterpret FF7’s mythos; it was taking a break from the bloated open world and throwing down the gauntlet in games of Queen’s Blood, a territory-based card game within the expansive RPG, and I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with it. Everyone I know now plays Magic: The Gathering, and after numerous alluring crossovers and bids from friends, I do too. And by the very end of the year, Pokemon TCG Pocket became a part of all of our day-to-day lives, allowing us to chase the thrilling feeling of filling a digital library with some of our favorite creatures.
The point is: In 2024, we proverbially bet big on card games. We went all in, so to speak, and it’s fascinating to wonder why this trend has picked up so much steam in recent years. These games vary in complexity and mechanics, but are there some underlying qualities that unify all these examples and make sense of the incredible year that they’ve enjoyed?
For starters, I think a lot of us have just been craving something simpler, and most of the aforementioned games certainly fit the bill. Balatro is, as its tagline suggests, Solitaire by way of Poker, a combination of one of oldest genres and one of the most widely played games of all time. Strip away the multipliers, the infectious music, and the booster packs (which are purchased with in-game money, not microtransactions), and it is a deceptively simple concept: produce winning hands like straights and flushes while meeting increasingly ludicrous demands and score totals. There are obviously mechanical and aesthetic flourishes which complicate matters, like the presence of game-altering jokers and a roguelike framework that appears to allow for endless play, but it really is a game to idly play for hours because, when broken down, it is as easy to understand as 1, 2, 3.
To a certain degree, you can play a lot of these games, which mostly boast easy-to-understand rulesets and formats, on auto-pilot. I can recognize a flush and quickly finish a round of Balatro with nary a thought in a crowded airport. Pokemon TCG Pocket actually features an auto-battle feature, in case you are mostly in it for the little guys rather than the dueling. Queen’s Blood eventually becomes a much more complicated game if you follow its questline to the very end, but otherwise it’s a pretty straightforward game of terrain conquest and making numbers go up. It’s refreshing to take a break from world-ending plots, menus upon menus, and consequential decisions to slip back into something more comforting, and that’s what these card games often have been. It was as true for Triple Triad and Gwent as it is for countless of these modern examples, and the fact that the trend has persisted for so long suggests that players definitely have an appetite for them.
In cases where there’s an undeniable level of complexity though, like with Magic: The Gathering and even high-level play of the aforementioned games, there’s something else entirely that seems to bring players into the fold, and I know it’s definitely been true for me.
There’s a social aspect to card games that shouldn’t be discounted. The biggest reason that I’ve been turned onto them of late is that everyone around me is doing something with them. Many of my closest friends have been buying Pokemon booster packs and collecting them for several months or years now. My roommate began having friends over to play matches of Magic: The Gathering’s Commander format at our dining-room table for hours on end. For months on end, I’ve watched from the outside as folks fell madly in love with Balatro’s blend of poker and roguelike mechanics, committed to runs composed of ridiculous power-ups and multipliers, and forged challenges to issue others.
As someone who tends to play games in solitude, or at the very least with a very select few, I looked to my colleagues and friends adopting these card games and building new rituals amongst each other and wanted in on the sense of community they were building up. I wanted to delight in the joy of awesome new rare card art with others. I wanted to try out something new in spaces filled with people I trusted. I wanted to be where the people were, and if that meant huddling around a table in person and learning the convoluted rules of new games, then so be it. Hell, even this very experience that I’m detailing was adapted to a game called TCG Card Shop Simulator, and that game did gangbusters, proving to me that I’m not alone in wanting these communal spaces that card games are so uniquely good at fostering.
I learned to love card games over middle-school lunches. Growing up, I collected cards aplenty, but I never bothered learning their rules and functions. It was regular bouts of Yu-Gi-Oh at lunchtime that first gave me a real appetite for card games. That and a youth spent playing Solitaire. Even then, they were a break from talk of Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, or whatever monstrously large RPG was the game du jour. And even then, it gave me an opportunity to sit around and really connect with people. Years later, I’m picking them back up for so many of the same reasons, and it leaves me wondering if everyone else is too?
What’s most exciting is that this card fever isn’t going anywhere. Slay the Spire 2 is on the horizon, and if that first game was any indication, it’s going to be one of the biggest games of 2025. Balatro has spent the year adding card collections themed around other games, dubbing these crossovers “Friends of Jimbo,” and I’m sure there are many more to come. Riot Games just recently announced that it’s expanding its League of Legends transmedia push into the realm of trading cards, and I’m sure there’s even more in the works. Whether it was digitally or physically, it’s hard to deny that card games have enjoyed a great deal of success this year, and it looks primed to spill over into the next.
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