Card games with friends, online.
The hardest part of playing cards with friends isn’t the game, it’s getting everyone together. Here a link solves that: you open the table, send it to the group, and whoever gets there first sits down.
Guide·updated ·4 min read
How it works, in three steps
You open a table and choose the game, how many seats it has and how long each player gets per move: 10 seconds, 30, or no timer at all, if you’re playing relaxed and talking along the way.
You send the table’s address to the group where you’re already chatting. Anyone who opens it sees the table right away: who’s sitting there and what cards are on the table. To SIT DOWN they need an account; to watch, they don’t.
When there are enough of you, the host starts the match. If someone’s missing, bots can take the remaining seats. The match then doesn’t count toward the leaderboard, but it plays the same.
What can be seen and what can’t
A table is visible to anyone who has the address. That’s on purpose: it’s how you invite a friend without making them create an account just to see where they’re being called.
What you see from the sidelines is exactly what you’d see standing next to a real table: who’s playing and what cards are on the table. Never anyone’s hand. The server doesn’t even send other people’s cards to your browser. They aren’t hidden in the interface; they simply never get there.
Which game to pick, by how many you are
Three or four: Seven Cut is at its best with this number. It has just the right depth and matches last 10–15 minutes, so you can play several in a row.
Five or six: Macao or Liar Liar. Both get better the more of you there are: Macao because penalties travel around the table and pile up along the way, Liar Liar because it gets harder to track who’s lying.
Two: Sweep, if you want a real game. We’ve written about that separately.
Can’t decide: Macao. It’s the game almost everyone in Romania knows, so you won’t have to explain it to anyone.
If you don’t all know the same rules
This is the real problem with playing cards with friends, and it isn’t a technical one: everyone learned Macao differently. One plays with the cutting 7, another with the king that reverses direction, another has never heard of stacking penalties.
Here a single variant is played, written out on each game’s page, and you can open the rules from the table without leaving it. It isn’t “the correct variant”, because there’s no such thing. It’s the house variant, so everyone plays by the same rules.
Each rules page also has a section on which variants are around and which of them is played here. It’s worth sending to the group before the first match; it saves you the argument in the third hand.
If someone leaves the table
It happens: a tab gets closed, the connection drops, someone rings the doorbell. Every move has a deadline, and anyone who misses it is out of the match. Their cards leave the game and the others carry on.
The server doesn’t play for anyone. The alternative would have been a player who has left but only seems to still be there, with everyone else playing a match without an opponent.
If you don’t want any rush at all, the host can open the table with no timer. Then nobody gets eliminated for thinking too long or going for coffee.