Dominion and Citadel seem to be the most cited and highest rated of the deck-building games, followed by Thunderstone.

The wife, being something of a zombie enthusiast, is interested in the Resident Evil DBG.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these games? Or any other games to suggest? What are they like?

I have Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer it is fast and fun, really easy to play.

I also have Resident Evil and it is harder to play and takes a while to set up so that takes some of the fun out of it....

I also play Call of Cthulhu living card game by fantasy flight games, it is sort of collectible as there are a ton of expansions but you can play with the starter box alone, it seems who ever goes first wins....but I still like the game.

I'm very interested by Blood Bowl Team Manager. Based on chatter on boardgamegeek it seems the game isn't very far from release. Deck building? With the Blood Bowl concept? Playable by 2 to 4 in one hour? Sign me in!

I've played Thunderstone. I was a complete newb, so...

Basically, you have a small deck of cards which represent men, coin, spells, and other resources at your disposal. A series of monster cards laid out in a row represent the dungeon. There are piles of cards which represent resources you can purchase in town.

Each turn, you can either try your luck in the dungeon or buy more resources in town.

You need resources to defeat the monsters, but the more cards you put in your deck, the greater the chance you won't have what you need when you need it.

I barely scratched the surface of the game, playing on the most basic set.

Seanchai

Fantasy Flight's LCG games are collectible, unfortuantely. They are just sold in a different way.

I beat this by creating my own CCG.

I gave all my mates card templates and design parameters so they would turn up with their own cards. A degree of culling was necessary of course

We played the crap out of it for 2 years so I guess it was a sucess.

I created a second one based on Amber but then the dark days of WoW began

Coincidentally, I'm actually just starting to design an online deck-building game that mimicks collectible card games.

The boardgamegeek thread for it is here.

I've played Dominion and Thunderstone quite a few time, and that Ascencion game once.

The basic idea of the game is that each turn you look at your hand, and look to see what actions you can perform to gather more cards, which then go into your discard.  You usually start with a dozen or so cards, and cycle through them quickly, picking up more and more cards.  You're working to get a consistant ability to draw useful cards in order to gain the cards that win you the game.

In Dominion, the cards that win you the game (usually - this has blended a little with the expansions) are green cards that do you no good during the game (they can't be played for any effect) but which are points that win you the game.  As such, most avenues for winning involve setting up your deck to allow you to generate enough money to buy the most expensive victory point cards, as they concentrate the most victory points in the fewest cards.

In Thunderstone, the #1 way of gathering victory points is killing monsters in the dungeon.  As such, you try to buy heros, weapons, spells, and other items in your deck so that when you draw your next hand, you'll have a powerful mix of cards to assault the dungeon with.  Although the original set doesn't have these, every set since has included cards which allow you to draw more cards during a battle, so there's more chance involved in a dungeon delve.

In both Thunderstone and Dominion, you're not playing with all of your cards - instead you play with 10 random special cards per game with Dominion, and a set of four heros and 8 random items in Thunderstone, as well as 3 monster types.  Both games come with special cards for choosing which random cards to use, but there are mobile phone apps and websites you can visit to randomly generate the decks much faster.

Ascension seemed similar to Dominion in general idea, but the fact that the cards available for purchase were completely random from turn to turn didn't make me enjoy it.  It's possible further plays would excite me more about it, but for now I've got plenty of other games to enjoy.

BTW: Although picking up the initial Dominion box is a great way to start playing that game, I tend to recommend the 'Thunderstone: Dragonspire' box for Thunderstone as a first buy for that game.  I think as they got more used to working on Thunderstone they came up with better ideas for powers and ways to design cards.  Also, it's got a much better method of storing the cards in the box.

Having just recently gotten into Dominion I can only offer my opinions on it.  But what drew me most to it was that it's theme was more benign (less geeky) then Ascencion or Thunderstone) which given that half the crowd of boardgame people that I play with don't like to go to geeky in theme was a plus.

The other facts that drew me to Dominion is that the core mechanic, play an action, buy a card, discard & draw back to 5 is the extent of the rules.  Then you just read what it says on the card.  So if you play an action card that says +2 cards you draw 2 more cards into your hand.  If it says +1 action you can play a second action card.  It's these combinations of cards that allow you to create chains of events.  But typically even these chains only usually average only 2 or 3 action cards total it means player turns are quick and have yet to get overly complicated.

We have only had a couple rules situations come up and they were fairly evident once we stepped back and just read the cards and kept the order of events in mind.  This combination of very simple core mechanics and straight forward card actions allows you to quickly come up to speed with the game and then allows you to develop a strategy.  This I've found greatly helps new people to the game since they don't get swamped in the mechanics and can instead just really focus on what they are doing.

Also depending on what setups you use you can tweak out the interactions of the game.   So if you have players that hate it when other people can screw with their strategies, then you can make a more friendly (solitaire) like setup.  One where everyone is still competing against each other but they can't play cards against each other.  Then of course there are more aggressive interactive cards as well.  But you really don't know how anyone is doing until towards the end of the game (at least at our current experience level) so that keeps the tension and the race high.  You always think you are doing well but never know.

Plus when compared to the other deck building games out there there are a bunch of expansions that allow you to further customize your experience, with different action cards, expanding the game from 2-4 players up to 6-8  players etc...

I think it's probably the most mature and well balanced deck building game of the bunch which can be important to some people.

But again I've only ever played Dominion.  I read a lot of reports on BGG to figure out which of the deck building games (Dominion, Ascension, Thunderstone, Nightfall or Resident Evil) would most fit my style and that of our group and in that Dominion seemed to be the best fit and it has been well received.

One big strike against Thunderstone for me was that typical play time seems to be in the 1 1/2 - 2 1/2 hr range.  Several of my playing group don't like long running games and while I have no problem myself when it's a game like Merchants and Marauders for example.  I think I'd get bored with playing a 2hr long card game.  I'd much rather play 3 or so shorter games that allow me to experiment with different strategies and setups.