Card Crawl 2 expands the dungeon deckbuilder with a larger board and new systems, out now on iOS and Android
Overview & Key Takeaways
Arnold Rauers has been making some of the best small card games on mobile for well over a decade. Card Crawl, Card Thief, and Miracle Merchant - each one has a clean surface hiding a surprisingly fiddly system underneath. Card Crawl 2 is his latest, and it's doing what his best work tends to do – taking something familiar and twisting it just enough to make you rethink everything you knew. The biggest change is the board itself. Where the original kept things tight with a handful of dungeon cards, you're now working across four columns with up to sixteen cards in play at once. That shift in scale changes everything. ... [MORE]
- Card Crawl 2 introduces a four-column board with up to 16 cards in play
- New equipment system and returning spells reshape each run
- Weekly Tavern Crawl and hero cards add long-term replayability
Arnold Rauers has been making some of the best small card games on mobile for well over a decade. Card Crawl, Card Thief, and Miracle Merchant - each one has a clean surface hiding a surprisingly fiddly system underneath. Card Crawl 2 is his latest, and it's doing what his best work tends to do – taking something familiar and twisting it just enough to make you rethink everything you knew.
The biggest change is the board itself. Where the original kept things tight with a handful of dungeon cards, you're now working across four columns with up to sixteen cards in play at once. That shift in scale changes everything.
You're not just reacting to what's in front of you anymore; you're planning several moves out, deciding when to equip, when to sell, and when to leave something sitting there because you might need it later.
That extra breathing room also makes space for new tools. Spell cards are back, but equipment is new this time around, and the right piece can quickly reshape a run in ways you don't always see coming. It's still recognisably solitaire-style card battling, but there's more room for small decisions to snowball. For better or worse.
Beyond individual runs, there's enough structure to keep you coming back. New hero cards each bring their own oddities to work around, and the Weekly Tavern Crawl gives you a regular reason to stress-test your builds against something less predictable.
Offline and online modes sit alongside each other without the whole thing losing that pick-up-and-play quality that made the original so easy to return to.
Card Crawl 2 is now available for free on iOS and Android.
If you want to see how it stacks up against the rest of the genre, check out our list of the best card battlers on iOS!
