If you're into tense card games with plenty of difficult decisions, you'll love Arboretum. What appears at first glance to be a lovely little card game about trees is, in fact, a cutthroat, sweaty knife fight. To add even more tension, you need to have the highest total value of a suit in your hand at the end of the game to score that suit's path, which makes managing your hand an exercise in careful balance and vicious hate-drafting. Every player has their own dedicated discard pile, and the trick is seeing what suits your opponents are playing and trying not to feed them those cards through your discards.

On your turn, you draw two cards (either from a deck or your opponents' discard piles), play a card to your arboretum, and then discard a card. The goal of the game is to create beautiful paths of trees that start and end with the same suit, with ascending numbers in between.

The only component in Arboretum is a deck of 80 cards composed of 10 colored suits that represent different species of trees. Progress, FFG!Ģ-4 players, 30 minutes, age 8+ / $20 at Amazon, Target And for the first time ever, you can fully engage in the game’s (simple) deckbuilding with only one core set. Marvel Champions is a Living Card Game, which means new (non-randomized) expansions will be released on a regular schedule. The heroes in the core set are Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Panther, She-Hulk, and Captain Marvel the villains are Rhino, Claw, and Ultron. Victory requires spending time in both your hero and alter-ego forms, thwarting the villains’ nefarious schemes (“thwart” is an actual hero stat) and just beating the living snot out of the villain himself. Choose a scenario, choose a hero deck, and you’re off. You play the game cooperatively with up to three friends-we recommend solo or 2-player games to keep things moving-and fight against the game itself. It also allows for players to race each other to finish a level as quickly as possible. In the multiplayer mode, the player has to kill as many enemies as possible and gain loot for points to rank up.

Marvel Champions is essentially a streamlined (and somewhat pared-down) version of Fantasy Flight’s very popular Lord of the Rings Card Game system, with some fun superhero-specific mechanics thrown in to keep things optimally thematic. The multiplayer mode allows the player to connect to the Internet and play with up to 64 other people. If you need some more convincing, read on. If you or your kids are fans of both Marvel and Magic-like card games, you can safely stop reading now and just pick up this game. 1-4 players, 45-90 minutes, age 14+ / $60 at Barnes & Noble, Miniature Market

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