9 Best Card Games for Kids, Adults and Parties

Less than 10 years old and already a classic, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is one of the country's most popular card games. "It's really easy to learn and fast to play," says Marisa LaScala, our senior parenting and relationships editor and kids' gift guide guru. "In my house, we break it out whenever we have a dull moment. I'm not good at it, but the art on the cards is really cute so I like playing anyway."

It's a shedding game and a slapjack game — players are trying to get rid of all their cards. The silly part is in remembering to say the words "taco," "cat," "goat," "cheese" and "pizza" in order around the table, placing a card down each time. When the spoken word matches the card placed down, everyone tries to be first to slap the pile.

If you fail to say your correct word you have to take the pile. There's also a race to do special things, like beat your chest when the "gorilla" card appears. Expect it to get loud and a lot of slamming hands; it's a riot.

"This game never fails to crack us up," a tester parent told us. In online reviews (more than 44,000 five-star reviews on Amazon) parents say kids as young as 4, 5 and 6 are good at it, and there's no reading or math required, but the official age grading is 7+.

A couple can play this but once you get a group of four to eight it gets louder and sillier. 2 to 8 players, ages 7+

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This bargain is my family's fave, and we've played it with all ages from little kids to Grandma. For kids under 7, it's best to have them partner with a bigger kid or relative because some strategy is involved. "I love Uno. It's a test of friendship," said my eldest child, because once you begin to suspect what cards your opponents are holding, you can help them or work against them.

This is another shedding game where the goal is to get rid of all cards. You have to remember to say "Uno" when you're down to your last one, alerting the others that you're close to winning — and giving them the opportunity to make you pick up more cards.

Uno has been around long enough that there are many versions for families ready to take the play to a new level. "We play Uno and the most popular variation in our house is Uno Flip," a parent told us. That's a two-sided deck, also under $10. Everyone starts playing on the light side, but if someone plays a FLIP card, everyone must turn their cards over and play off the dark side.

"We enjoy Uno Attack," another parent said. "For some reason, a heartless machine spitting out cards at random is endlessly hilarious." 2 to 10 players, ages 7+

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Priorities is a new card game from Britain. It's for grown-ups and adult parties and is of the "How well do they know me?" variety. It's also cooperative, as everyone works as a group to guess how you rank five things from what you love best to what you hate the most.

The person whose turn it is takes five cards and lays them out in a random order. Then that person lists their priorities, from best to worst, on the little dry erase board (a dry erase pen is also included), keeping their ranking a secret. The rest of the party tries to correctly guess their order.

Some cards are obviously bad — everyone hates soggy footwear, so that will fall low on the list — but most of them are divisive, like whether or not a person loves fireworks, weddings, Tinder or man buns. As in, do you hate man buns even more than you hate soggy footwear?

The fun is seeing if the others know you and if they know how strongly you feel about certain things, like skinny jeans. (I love them forever, I don't care.) Expect lots of fun conversation and maybe even people trying to argue you out of your own rankings. It's fun with friends but also with near strangers who try to guess by assumption. But it might not be a game you return to again and again, especially if you always play with the same group. 3 or more players, ages 14+

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Disney Lorcana Gateway won one of our Best Toys Awards for big kids. If they love Disney or trading card games or both, it's is a fun trading card strategy game based in the Disney universe.

The Gateway set is for newbies. At first only a portion of the deck is usable, and once players master the rules for those cards and succeed in a few quests, they can unlock more of the deck and learn more advanced rules. It's best for two players.

"We have been playing non-stop since it arrived and the Disney Lorcana app to track your cards is a wonderful bonus. My son loves this more than his Pokemon cards, which I did not think was possible!" one parent said.

The artwork came up over and over again in tester feedback, and even those who weren’t traditional Disney collectors found the cards to be gorgeous collectibles. There are many other starter decks and inexpensive small packs of cards to keep adding, which are easy to find in mass retail chains, so if you all get really into Disney Lorcana, it can be an ongoing expense — but ongoing fun, too.

Pay attention to the age grading; 7-year-olds who played this with siblings felt it was boring and confusing, but kids ages 8 to 12, and their parents, got into it. If a younger kid ages 6 or 7 wants a trading card game, we recommend Pokemon Battle Academy. 2 players, ages 8+

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A 7-year-old designed Taco vs Burrito, and the gross-out food humor reflects that. Players are either filling a taco or a burrito, and there's some math involved as the goal is to build the meal with the highest point value.

Even first graders know that a 3 is higher than a 1, so young kids can pick up the strategy. But this game also introduces multiplication, like doubling, and subtraction, which adds a learning component. Be prepared to teach kids some things, like how multiplying a negative number is going to get someone even further away from winning.

On each turn a player plays a card and draws a new one. The strategy is in deciding whether you want to add something like chocolate-covered shrimp to your own taco or burrito, or whether you'd rather use your turn to tuck something like curdled milk into an opponent's taco or burrito. There are also action cards, like you can give someone else a tummy ache. Draw the health inspector card and you have to throw out everything in your meal except the shell.

There's a QR code to scan so you can watch an instructional video, which is nice for families who don't want to read through a bunch of directions. There are a lot of action cards in the game, so the instructions are long. You can also watch a YouTube video with illustrated instructions. 2 to 4 players, ages 6+

Skillmatics makes a lot of Guess in 10 card games that are essentially 20 questions-style learning games — the theme of this one is animals. Kids have to be able to read or must partner up with someone who can as there are a lot of animal facts on each card.

The name really says it: Players ask questions in an effort to guess which animal is on the card. It's family-friendly and also travel-friendly, but probably much less interesting if you have a group of only adults. It's made for adults and kids to play together. If your kids are really little, there's a junior edition with fewer words, more pictures and basic animals that kids ages 3 to 6 can identify.

Beyond animals there are many other sets to appeal to your kids' particular passions. Guess in 10 sets cover outer space (with planet facts and more), sports, food and now pop culture like Guess in 10 Disney Edition and Guess in 10 Marvel. (Actually, I know some adults who would geek out on that last one.) 2 to 6 players, ages 6+

We'd be remiss to not include Exploding Kittens with its more than 88,000 five-star Amazon reviews. There's both luck and skill involved in this card game. It's a bit of Russian roulette — if you draw an exploding kitten card, you're in trouble. There's a bit of strategy, as you can decide when to employ action cards to save yourself or "betray friends," as the brand says.

This game has also been compared to UNO, except with this, the last player alive is the one who wins. It is officially supposed to take about 15 minutes, but some Reddit reviewers say that their Exploding Kittens games can go a lot longer.

I've played this enough times to be a little blasé about it, so I'm interested in the variations. There's a Streaking Kitten Expansion Pack that changes the gameplay so you can hold on to an exploding-kitten card. Other expansions include Barking Kittens and Zombie Kittens.

There's also a travel-size version for two to four players, plus an Exploding Minions variation and a NSFW Edition for adults (mostly bathroom and body humor) targeted for ages 17+. 2 to 5 players, ages 7+

New from the makers of Exploding Kittens is this party game you can play in 90-second rounds. You're looking to shed all of your cards, and you do it by finding someone who is holding a card that matches one of yours so the two of you can complete the cards' action, like giving each other a high five. Then you both discard that card and move on to find a partner for the next card's action.

It's noisy — all players talk at once and play at once in order to locate someone they can do an action with. There's little thinking and little strategy involved, which makes it fun for different ages. There's also none of the boredom of waiting for a turn.

This is not a game to travel with, nor it is anything you can do with only two players. In fact, the larger the group the better (and crazier), up to eight people. 3 to 8 players, ages 6+

For playing card games like war or poker, or single-player card games like solitaire, all you need is a traditional deck of cards. You can easily search the web for games and rules; the Bicycle Cards brand, for instance, will teach you card games via online instructions.

You can probably scrounge up a deck of cards at home, or at a Dollar Store, but if you're looking to buy a gift, I'm partial to this new two-deck set that features LEGO flowers. They appeal to kids or adults.

There's obviously no end to the variations on a deck of cards. A Bicycle Deck is a classic and under $5 but you can also find waterproof playing cards, mini playing cards and themes that range from the National Parks to Black History.