6. Card Carnival

When I first played Card Carnival, I couldn’t quit it fast enough. See, I really struggled to learn Queen’s Blood at first (as you’ll note, I did not write our Queen’s Blood guide as I just took a brute force method to that whole thing), so when Rebirth asked me to play an augmented version of Queen’s Blood…nope, I’m not doing that.

As I find myself now scraping the barrel of doables in Rebirth, I figured it was time to change that and, huh, it actually teaches you how to play Queen’s Blood more effectively. Who’d’ve thought? It sets up what are essentially Queen’s Blood games that have been paused. Some cards are on the board, with pawns available to lay down a preselected hand of cards. There’s a specific way to win each one, which are all great strategies for the actual game itself.

In fact, Card Carnival is particularly great at teaching Queen’s Blood because while you can get through it via brute force (which I am very prone to doing), you’ll get through it way, way faster if you think a few steps ahead of where you are….you know, which is probably how normal people play games like this. — Claire Jackson