Blog / Games

The Fastest-Growing Board and Card Games in 2026

By the Pirate Deal crew · November 8, 2026 · 5 min read

The whole market is growing again

US toy sales grew 6% in 2025, after a few years of standing still or shrinking, according to the market researcher Circana. Games and puzzles led the way.

Worldwide, estimates of the size of the board game market in 2025 range from about $12.6 billion to about $20 billion, because each research firm counts things a little differently. Most of them expect it to keep growing by roughly 7% to 11% a year over the next several years.

Inside those numbers, three games stand out.

1. Pokémon cards

Pokémon was the single biggest story in American toys last year. Circana's figures put Pokémon at $2.5 billion in US toy sales in 2025, up 87% on the year before. That's what drove the 37% jump in games and puzzles, and trading cards also led a 20% rise in another of Circana's categories, "explorative and other toys".

The Pokémon Trading Card Game is about 30 years old. It works two ways at once: you can play with the cards, or collect them, and plenty of people do both.

2. Magic: The Gathering

Magic first came out in 1993, and 2025 was a record year for it. Hasbro reported $1.72 billion in Magic revenue, up 59% from $1.08 billion in 2024. For a game that's more than three decades old, that's remarkable growth.

3. Board games on your phone

Monopoly Go!, a mobile game built on the classic board game, launched worldwide in April 2023. In January 2026, the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated that players had spent $6 billion in it on the App Store and Google Play. It got there in 1,275 days, faster than any mobile game before it.

It plays differently from the one in the box: you roll dice to move around a board and build up landmarks, with friends raiding you along the way. But it shows how many people want a familiar tabletop game in their pocket.

What the fastest-growing games have in common

This part is our own take, not a statistic. Looking at the three games above, a few things line up:

• They're built on something familiar. Pokémon cards date from 1996, Magic from 1993, and Monopoly from 1935. People come back to games they already know.
• They're cards, or they're on a phone. Both are easy to carry, quick to set up, and easy to fit into a spare half hour.
• They're social. Trading, battling a friend or racing them up a board: the fun is in playing against people you know.

Where Pirate Deal fits in

We built Pirate Deal around those same ideas. It's a quick card game for 2 to 5 players, where you collect treasure, steal from your friends and race to finish three collections. It's played on a phone, with friends anywhere or with strangers online, and a game takes minutes rather than hours. If you know Monopoly Deal, here's how they compare.