I'm developing a simple card game, where there will be a matchmaking system that will put you against another human player. This will be the only game mode available, a 1vs1 against another human, no AI.

I want to prevent cheating as much as possible. I have already read a lot of similar questions here and I already know that I cannot trust the client and I have to make all verifications server side. I intend to have a server (need one for the matchmaking anyway) and I intend to make some verifications server side but if I want to check everything server side this makes my server to be able to keep track of the state of all current games and check every action, and I don't have the money/infrastructure to support that server.

My idea is to make clients check and verify some of the actions made by their opponent* and if they find some illegal action notify the possible cheating to the server and make the server verify it. This will still require my server to keep track of all current games, but it will save resources only checking some things that cannot be checked at client side(like card order in the deck) and only checking other things when they are actually wrong.

*(only those they can check with out allowing themselves cheating! for example:they can't check if the played card was in hand cos that will need them to know all cards in hand)

Summing up, my questions are: is this a viable approach? will I actually save resources doing this or the extra complexity in the server and client for exchanging this messages is not worth it? do you know any game that has successfully or unsuccessfully tried a similar approach?

Thanks all for reading and answering