Im familiar enough with board games to know that I’m asking a lot here. My goal is to have a game that I can carry around with me, walk up to people I meet in public, and ask them to play.
The most obvious path here I thought of would be some type of game played with a standard deck of cards. While I’m not opposed to this, I fear the randomness that comes with that might not be what I’m looking for. I want the game to be strategic with minimal luck but simple enough that a first time player could reasonably win against someone experienced.
Something like Hive comes to mind, as it has the pocket variation and seems like it could be easy enough to teach, but I have yet to play it so I fear it might be daunting to newcomers in ways similar to chess.
Thank you in advance for any and all answers, and if you would like further clarification I’d be happy to elaborate!
Our portable goto is Star Realms, but other card-based games will work. Dominion comes to mind except for the deck size!
Star Relams is a great choice! Basically a deck builder where each player is building their deck throughout the game. There are factions, and economy, and expansions to extend the variability.
Dominion is also good, but you’d need to decide on the deck to use ahead of time (Dominion has multiple decks you can build for normal play, so most games only use a fraction of all the cards).