Top pick
In this wild deck-building game, players compete to make a deal with the devil — and use crazy multipliers to meet the demon’s impossible demands.
Who it’s for: Folks who enjoy bonkers deckbuilding mechanics and an 80’s-era satanic panic aesthetic.
Player count: one to four
Duration: 45 to 90 minutes
Rules: PDF
Ages: 14 and up
In most popular media, selling your soul to a demon is almost always a bad idea — exceptionally talented fiddle players aside. But in Dark Pact, players compete for the privilege of making a deal with the devil.
Dark Pact is a deck-building game that casts you as an occult researcher in a race to complete your demon deal before other players can. You do this by playing cards from your starter deck (identical to everyone else’s) in order to execute actions, play treasures, and buy more powerful cards, which can be used to execute more actions or buy even more valuable cards.
But here’s the twist: Unlike in most similar games, at the start no one knows how to win. Each player has to acquire one of the 14 dark pact cards as they come available, and then execute the card’s requirements.
The pacts vary, but almost always involve seemingly impossible tasks. For instance, one requires you to have 20 unused actions in a turn, even though you’re allowed only one action per turn. (You can use that action to play cards that give additional actions, but even the most powerful cards only give three or four extra actions when played.) Another asks you to have 40 unspent coins in a turn, while most cards that give out coins only produce three or four when played. You get the idea.
To achieve these lofty goals, players can collect and play 2X and 3X multiplier cards alongside their action or treasure cards, multiplying every number on the played card — and those multipliers can stack. So, if I play a card that normally gives me one additional action and lets me draw three cards, and I add a 2X and a 3X alongside it, I now have six additional actions and I can draw 18 cards from my deck.
This gives Dark Pact an unpredictable power curve. As players collect multiplier cards, they can transform what at the start was a very simple turn — take one action, buy new cards, and clean up — into a comically complicated and overwhelming sequence with dozens of actions that allow them to buy multiple cards seemingly out of nowhere.
Add to that the flexibility of being able to choose your win condition (or switch win conditions if a more favorable option presents itself), and the game can become a bit ridiculous. But it rewards players who can build flexibility into their decks from the start, and who know how to maximize those combinations when they come up in their hand.
The fun doesn’t stop with the wild mechanics, either. The art style and theming is evocative and dark, creating a look that wouldn’t be out of place in a 15th-century monastery — or on the t-shirt of an 80s heavy metal band.
