IMHO, Fluxx is fun and pleasingly meta… but it’s also extremely silly. It’s the kind of game that is quite fun to pull out and play occasionally with casual gamers, but not the kind of game you’d get together with serious game playing friends and play once a week.
Is you like Sushi Go, I recommend you check out Fairy Tale. It takes the basic rules of Sushi Go and makes them better.
In Sushi Go you draft a card and immediately play it. In Fairy Tale, there’s drafting rounds where you draft five cards. And then there are playing rounds where you play three of the five cards you drafted (and discard the other two). You do this four times so in the end you have a tableau of twelve cards that you score.
This gives Fairy Tale new levels of strategy because you get to work on collecting cards before you have to play them. You also now have more opportunity to “hate draft” where you take a card that you don’t want in order to deny it to another player who you can see does want it.
Some of my other favorites are Fidelitas, Red7, and Trickster. I also enjoy Actionworks but I have a harder time recommending it because it’s very hard to find a copy and you really need six players to experience the full game.
If you’re going to pick up Sushi Go, go all the way and get Sushi Go Party. It adds a bunch of new cards, which you can sub in for the also-included cards from the original game to make a near-infinite amount of decks. It also adds a counter track for scoring, and now you can play with up to eight players.
I’ll also recommend Kodama, The Tree Spirits. The Studio Ghibli-esque design elements are what caught my eye, but the inventive game mechanics are pretty unique. You play your branch cards off your starting trunk card to build your tree and score points, so there’s a physical element to placement, as you choose which branches to extend and a card you play can’t touch any card but the one you are attaching it to.
um, you could grab Dragonmaster off ebay which is a very playable remake, or the (less playable imho) more recent take called Indulgence.
both played with no traditional decks.
splendor is a fantastic card game that isn’t really a card game but one that is played with cards.
I haven’t played it in years but I enjoy Mille Bornes
I remember the actual gameplay of Wizard being underwhelming, but I have good memories of it because one of my friends started yelling WIIIZAAARD whenever he played the titular card and it became something of an inside joke for us.
Tichu - I’ll be the third or fourth to recommend this game.
“The Game” - a cooperative card game, with limited communication between players. There is a deck with cards from 2 through 99. Each player starts with 5 or 6 cards. The object is to get all of the cards from the deck onto the table by placing them on 4 piles in either increasing or decreasing order.
“Mind” - a new game that I don’t think is released yet. Another game with a deck from 1 to 100 and limited communication. This game is played in a number of rounds, again trying to get cards out of you hand in ascending order.
There are a slew of deck building games, but I assume that is different than what you are looking for.
It’s been released in Germany and the Netherlands. There hasn’t been an English-language version released yet.
Another vote for Fluxx.