TL;DR
Knights in Tight Spaces • Marvel’s Midnight Suns • Hand of Fate • Monster Train • Neon White — five games that use cards in unconventional ways, from tactical RPGs to high-speed FPS gameplay.
Table of Contents
Knights in Tight Spaces
Knights in Tight Spaces is a follow-up to Fights in Tight Spaces, except one that replaces modern aesthetics with what could be generally described as a light D&D-core. You’ve got a variety classes, including nimble rogues and chain lightning-slinging mages, all crammed in smallish, grid-based rooms with a hand of action cards to play on each turn, forcing you to adjust your tactics on the fly.
The fantasy bent of Knights… really serves the gameplay well, adding a welcome layer of diversity to the foundations built by the predecessor. The game also has a really neat art direction, with characters looking like 3D colored pencil sketches duking it out in small, yet interactive, locations. If you’re hungry for turn-based fantasy after Baldur’s Gate 3 and Tactical Breach Wizards, this should be your jam.
Knights in Tight Spaces
Release Date: March 04, 2025
Genres: Fighting, Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Tactical, Indie, Card & Board Game
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Midnight Suns, a tactical RPG from Firaxis, was a bit of a risky experiment. It was broadly based on Marvel comics, but instead of being an action game, it followed a similar path to Knights…: it is a turn-based, tactical game about superheroes, each of which has a deck of cards reflecting their abilities in various ways. For example, Spider-Man is really good at using environmental hazards.
The key to success is maximizing your card plays and using each hero’s unique mechanics to get the most out of their cards. As you get more cards over the course of the campaign, you’ll find handy synergies and upgrades. With luck and planning, they might let you clear an encounter in a single round filled with spectacular displays of power, which is incredibly satisfying every time.
Marvel's Midnight Suns
Release Date: December 02, 2022
Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Tactical
Hand of Fate
Moving away from turn-based tactics into the action game territory…of sorts. While an occasional battle is fought as a third-person perspective action game, everything else is represented by cards. The “dungeon” you explore is a grid of cards drawn from a deck by the mysterious Dealer, each hiding an encounter, a store, perhaps a path further down the dungeon. Any loot and resources you earn is a card too!
Over time, your deck of cards expands, allowing for more encounters, new bosses, better gear. And once the battle starts, it’s quite fun to see a magic axe card turn into a 3D model flying into your character’s hand while a helmet manifests above him. Hand of Fate isn’t a thrilling action extravaganza, but it is quite engaging, and a great game to fire up for a run or two at a time.
Hand of Fate
Release Date: February 17, 2015
Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board Game
Hand of Fate 2
Release Date: January 1, 1970
Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Turn-based strategy (TBS), Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board Game
Monster Train
The forces of Heaven are upon you, the stalwart defender of the last flame yet burning in Hell. As your demonic train transports the pyre, you need to defend it with your card-conjured magics and monsters. You have several floors of the train car to protect, and the angelic assault is unrelenting, so you better stack that deck in your favor and plan your upgrades accordingly.
There are five monstrous clans, each with different specialty and playstyle… and you can benefit from two of them, by picking a secondary one for your run. Interestingly, there’s even a multiplayer mode, but it’s not a PvP slug-fest, instead several players compete to get to the end first. This Hell Rush mode is competitive, just not directly antagonistic, “just” a test of skill and resource management.
Monster Train
Release Date: May 21, 2020
Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Indie, Card & Board Game
Monster Train 2
Release Date: May 21, 2025
Genres: Role-playing (RPG), Strategy, Turn-based strategy (TBS), Indie, Card & Board Game
Neon White
To cap the list off, let’s have a game which uses card entirely unlike any other title on the list. Neon White is a card-based first-person shooter with high skill-ceiling. Your job is simple: you need to kill all the demons in the level. To do so you need to collect special cards, which act as your weapons when you hold them, but provide special abilities when discarded. It’s up to you to find how to use them best.
The faster you complete a level, the better, which encourages getting creative with the cards, searching for shortcuts, and getting a bit into the speedrunner mindset. Since it’s not a deck-builder and instead uses cards more like power-ups than anything else, it’s the most non-traditional card game on the list, but it’s nevertheless well worth playing if you aren’t averse to fast-faced FPS gameplay.
Neon White
Release Date: June 16, 2022
Genres: Shooter, Platform, Indie, Visual Novel
Draw, discard, dominate
This is it for our quick look at card-based games which aren’t in the vein of Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone. From tactics to shooters, most of these games you couldn’t play on tabletop. Except for Hand of Fate, that one did get a board game.
If you’d like to be dealt a few fun hands with no need to buy additional booster packs, check the deals on these games you can find on our marketplace!