The Crew: Mission Deep Sea and Regicide

A pair of card games requiring some brain power!

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

This very affordable and excellent cooperative trick taking game is super simple on the surface and will be easy to understand if you play other trick taking games like Hearts. The deck of 40 cards contains numbers 1-9 in four colors and black submarine cards numbered 1-4. Whoever gets the 4 submarine is the leader and gets to start by playing one card. Players must then in turn play a card of a similar color/suite or anything if they don't have a matching one.

Other than flavor text, it has nothing really to do with diving or the ocean.

Whoever played the highest number whose color matches the first card or played the highest submarine card wins the trick. They then get to start the next one. The interesting part comes from the "cooperative" section of the game where people get assigned missions, pulled from a secondary deck of scaling difficulty. Maybe this round I cannot win any tricks while you must win using a blue 5 or something. Should anyone fail their mission everyone fails, and the fact that you mainly can't show your cards to each other (apart from one card ONCE per mission and indicate if its your highest/lowest/or only of that color/suite) makes it that much more challenging and really gets the brain working.

It can be tough if you aren't used to trick taking so expect to "be that guy that lost the game" (usually me) but at the same time also have an open mind and ask questions to improve your game. I'm at the point now where I know where I go wrong, and follow up by asking after the game what from my options I should have done so I'll know better next time. I'm also practicing card counting in that on the last trick (everyone has one card), I try get everyone to predict what cards remain.

It also sets up and plays really fast which is fantastic. If you like cards, trick taking and cooperative games, you should definitely check this one out.

Regicide

Because this card game uses the standard deck of 52 cards, you can freely play it with the rules found here. In it, you must cooperatively defeat a castle of 4 Jacks, 4 Queens and 4 Kings using the rest of the cards as your troops and suites indicate special powers/troop types (which are nullified when facing enemies of the same suite). Clubs do double damage, Spades block damage, Hearts heal by returning discarded cards to the available tavern deck and Diamonds hand out said cards from the tavern deck to you and your allies. Except if  

If a player fails to kill an enemy by playing their card (or a set if they have one), they then must suffer the damage from the enemy in return. Jacks do 10 damage for example, and so you must discard 10 worth of numbers to survive (a 5, 3 and 2 would cover it). If you survive, great! It's the next players turn. If not, then all the players have lost. This gets tough to mitigate as Queens do 15 and Kings do 20 damage per hit!

While you probably need a decent amount of luck to win, this game is easily accessible but expect to do a fair bit of maths as you play. The Queen who starts with 15 ATK and 30 HP has taken 6 spades + 4 clubs of damage so... what's her HP and current damage? Expect to be doing calculations like that every turn. Given that this game is so easily accessible, I do recommend trying it out at least once.