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.