The five best customizable card games

Customizable games put the interesting decisions before you sit down. You build a deck, test it, and rebuild it — the game on the table is where you find out whether you were right.

They reward investment more than any other category, which is both the appeal and the warning. Buy into one your group will keep playing rather than three you will each try once.

How this list is chosen

These five come from the same query that powers the finder, run with one filter pre-set. Expansions are excluded, so everything here is a game you can buy and play on its own, and only games with at least a hundred ratings are eligible.

Ranking is by community rating adjusted for how many people voted, not by raw average — otherwise a game rated 9.0 by a hundred devotees would outrank a classic rated 8.6 by forty thousand. The full method is here, and you can set your own filters to narrow this further by age, complexity or player count.