Tanto Cuore

Tanto Cuore is a series of maid-themed deck-building card games designed by Masayuki Kudoh and published by the Japanese publisher Arclight, starting 2009. Players start with a small deck of "love" cards and a few maids, and may use the love cards to employ new maids that enter their deck, very similar to the mechanisms in the 2009 Spiel des Jahres winner Dominion.

Unlike Dominion, in Tanto Cuore some cards may be set aside, instead of being played. These are mostly cards with a Victory Point value, and players thus have the ability to slim their decks without getting rid of the card in question. However, cards set aside this way is open information and is the target for negative VP cards from other players.

Tanto Cuore also contains "private maids"; special cards with a game-long durative effect. These never enter the player's deck but render their effect each turn (and are targets for negative VP cards) and there is only one copy of each, and in which order they are employable is randomized at the start of the game.

Tanto Cuore has seen two expansions/extensions that are both stand-alone: Tanto Cuore: Expanding the House and Tanto Cuore: Romantic Vacation. First Expansion introduces special Victory Point cards that never enter the player's deck but requires special circumstances in order to be bought, and Vacation has special Victory Point cards that cannot be bought but only gained from discarding a specified number of cards of specified costs.

Late 2011, a Tanto Cuore game with a Worker Placement mechanism added saw the light of day: Motto Tanto Cuore. In this, the maids can, on top of the other effects, generate "skill points" like Device, Concentration or Effort. The game works like Tanto Cuore, with the added mechanism that each player first must choose a " high class maid" (like a role) before everyone takes their turn. Only certain high class maids allow the player to gain certain VP cards, hence the battle for these adds spice. These VP cards never enter the players' decks, and since the player also needs to play maids with enough skill points to be able to gain the cards, the VP gaining slightly resembles that of Tanto Cuore: Romantic Vacation.

Tanto Cuore base set was published in English in 2011 by CardHaus, who also released the base set promos as a set. There has been a handful of promo cards for each box; some of them restricted to being the same card(s) with only a larger picture, some with the same card effect but new art, and a selected few that are completely new. Most of the promo cards are private maids. Cardhaus has scheduled to release the two expansions during 2012.