17 Best PS4 Board and Card Games

Voice of Cards is a role-playing game dressed up as a tabletop session. Everything is represented using cards, and you move around the world as a game piece. A lot of the Drakengard and Nier crew made it, with Yoko Taro as creative director and Keiichi Okabe on the music. Yoko first pitched it as a social mobile game, and producer Yosuke Saito insisted on a small console game instead. Yoko said he wanted to emulate the feeling of being an "otaku gamemaster".

It met with positive reviews, mostly for its presentation and story, and two more Voice of Cards games followed the next year: The Forsaken Maiden and The Beasts of Burden. The players who found it named it among the games they were playing or looking forward to the month it came out.

Master Duel is the free-to-play Yu-Gi-Oh! for people who already know the rules. Konami wanted a game for more experienced players, since Duel Links was made for casual ones. The gameplay is a simulated version of the real card game, with its own Forbidden and Limited List and its own schedule for new cards. A Solo Mode, with duels against the AI, came out of an idea during development.

It was a hit right away. Within a week it reached 262,333 concurrent players on Steam, and it won a PlayStation Partner Award for being one of the highest grossing games worldwide. Players who recommend it love it, and some of them play a lot of it.

The sequel to Hand of Fate came out in November 2017, from the same small Brisbane studio, Defiant Development. It keeps the idea of the first game, where the Dealer builds your adventure out of cards and the fights play out in real time. After it, Defiant started work on a game about a family that finds a board game called Hexes & Heroes, which leads them into a fantasy world.

Players who loved the first Hand of Fate tend to recommend the two together. Hand of Fate 2 has its own fans too, people who were counting the days before it came out. Start with the first one, and if the Dealer gets under your skin, this is the next stop.

Chess Ultra is the second chess game on this list from Ripstone, and the newer of the two. It came out in 2017 and got a Switch port a few months later. You can play local or online, and the online side supports cross-platform play on every version except the PS4 one.

Players name it as their chess pick on the PS4. One who had played both of Ripstone's chess games put the difference plainly: "multiplayer is much better compared to pure chess which took forever to make moves." If you want a game of chess finished tonight, this is the one.

Gwent began as the card game inside The Witcher 3, and in 2018 it came out as a free-to-play game of its own. It is a turn-based card game between two players that lasts two or three rounds, and the first to win two out of three rounds wins. Decks mix bronze cards, which you can have two copies of, with gold cards, which you can own only once. PC and console players could play each other, though PS4 and Xbox players never could.

Players who joined during the long beta loved it. CD Projekt Red announced that support for Gwent would wind down at the end of 2023, so think of it as a game with a finished story.

Pure Chess is Ripstone's first chess game, and on the PS3 it was only ever sold as a download from the PlayStation Store. Online games are asynchronous: you make your move, and your friend makes theirs whenever they get to it. Reviewer Rose did not like that and listed several flaws in the multiplayer mode.

Players still bring it up as a chess game worth owning. Playing one friend over a few days suits it well. If you want a faster online game, Chess Ultra is one spot up.

Monopoly has been a video game for more than 35 years, starting with the first licensed version in 1984 for the Commodore 64. Monopoly Plus is the one PS4 owners got. Ubisoft liked it enough to keep using it: in 2017 Ubisoft released a more traditional Monopoly on the Switch based on Monopoly Plus, and the 2020 Stadia version was built from that Switch game.

Players put it on their lists of local multiplayer games for up to four people. It is Monopoly, so the usual family arguments come in the box at no extra cost.

This is Ubisoft's Uno, the card game nearly everyone already knows, with a few extras. There are themed decks with their own special cards: the Rayman deck has cards called Dragon and Punching Things, and the Just Dance deck is based on Just Dance 2017. Uno Flip!, with double-sided cards based on Mattel's 2019 version, came as a separate paid add-on.

Players play it online with friends, or against bots when nobody else is around. It is one of the easiest games on this list to get a whole room playing.

Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder based on the rules of poker. You play poker hands to earn chips and beat the blinds, then spend your winnings on Jokers that change how hands score. It launched with 150 Jokers, and finding the ones that work together is the game. LocalThunk made it over two and a half years, inspired by the card game big two and the roguelike Luck Be a Landlord. It came out on the PS4 and most other systems on February 20, 2024.

It reached the PS4 late, after most of the games here had years of fans behind them, and it still made the top ten. Players call it addictive and play it for hours on end.

Legacy of the Duelist was developed by Other Ocean Interactive and published by Konami in 2015 for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. It is a digital collectible card game, and deck-building is at the centre of it: over 6,000 cards are in the base game, from across the card game's generations.

Players who grew up with the cards call it a nostalgia trip. If you never cared about Blue-Eyes White Dragon, this will not change your mind. If you did, there is a lot here to build with.

Prominence Poker is the free poker game players kept pointing people to on the PS4. If you are into poker, it is the one they recommend, and the fact that it costs nothing comes up again and again. Free-to-play games often lean hard on their stores, and players list this one among the free games that are fun without spending money.

Players also describe it as laid back, the kind of game you play a few hands of with some music on. It is a good way to learn the game without putting real money on the table.

For the King is a role-playing game with strategy and roguelike elements, laid out like a board game. Your party moves across a map, with speed deciding how far you go on land, and you stop in towns to heal or shop. Much of the design comes from a board game concept Colby Young made years before the project, and a core team of three built it: Young, Gord Moran and David Lam. Their Kickstarter asked for CA$40,000 and raised CA$133,661 from over 3,000 backers. It went into early access in February 2017 and was finished in April 2018, and For the King II followed in November 2023.

Players love it as a co-op game for three, on the couch or online. Some call it an overlooked gem.

Trivial Pursuit Live! is the quiz board game made for a living room. Players like it because it is simple and cheap, and because it works with friends and family who do not play much else.

It comes up again and again as a game for a partner who is not into games, next to other trivia games. Players also recommend it for nights with friends and for the whole household. Finding out who in the family is secretly the smart one is half the fun.

Armello recreates a tabletop role-playing game in a fantasy world full of animal characters. Cards and dice are how you act on the world, and they decide the fights too. Turns move faster than at a real table, because you can equip items and buy talents while another player is taking their turn.

Players who tried it like it. It is the closest thing on this list to a board game night with strangers.

Hand of Fate has you work through dungeons built from cards drawn out of decks you customise, trying to reach the boss at the end of each one. Your hero meets a strange Dealer, voiced by Anthony Skordi, in a "cabin at the end of the world", and he deals the whole adventure. Defiant Development, a team of about fifteen in Brisbane, first showed it at the 2013 Game Developers Conference. It was one of the first Australian projects to launch on Kickstarter.

It received generally positive reviews, and it led to a crowdfunded physical version of the game. Players describe it as a card game where the fights play like the Batman Arkham games, and they often call it overlooked.

Inscryption mixes computer animation, pixel art, drawn art and live action, and it hides an alternate reality game inside and outside the game. Mullins put a prototype on itch.io in December 2018, and the response led him to build it into much more. In the first act you sit across from Leshy in his cabin and play a roguelike deck-building game, starting from a simple deck. If the attacking card is unopposed, it hits the opponent directly.

It won several Game of the Year awards and sold 1 million copies by January 2022. Reviewers praised the card battles and the story, though the later parts got some criticism. A free expansion, Kaycee's Mod, came in March 2022 for people who only want the card game. Players who name it count it among their favourites, and they say to know as little as possible going in.

Slay the Spire is a single-player roguelike deck-building game, and it is widely credited with making that genre popular. You pick one of four characters, each with their own cards, and climb a spire of floors that is generated fresh each time. You build your deck as you go from the rewards you win, and relics give you permanent boosts for the rest of the run. It was released in early access on PC in late 2017 and came to the PS4 in May 2019.

It was nominated for multiple awards in 2019 and 2020, and Slay the Spire II reached early access in March 2026. Players love how a run fits into an evening and how it never gets old. They recommend it far more than any other PS4 board or card game.