CARD GAMES AROUND THE WORLD
Today is the official start of Cardgames.club. A good time to talk a little about the world of traditional card games and about my plans with this website.
On Cardgames.club you’ll find traditional card games. These are the card games, played with suited playing cards. The French suits, hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs are the most common and have been spreading around the world for many centuries. In a few places, like the south of Germany, Spain and Latin America for example, the suits are swords, batons, cups and coins, which can also be used to play traditional card games.
Despite the rise in popularity of modern card games, like Magic: the Gathering, playing classic card games is still the favorite pastime for millions of people around the world, from Iceland to South Africa and from Japan to the Azores. The world of card games is an evolving one. New games emerge out of existing games, or the same game can have different rules in different places, where the rules have evolved locally, like languages do. Different versions of the well-known game of Rummy, for example, are played in Greece, India, Bolivia and even in Chad. Even the arrival of the internet has not resulted in standardization of the rules even of the most common games, because websites offer their own preferred version of a game. For Cardgames.club, most of the time, I have chosen the most common rules, but sometimes I have deviated a little, for example to speed up a game. Your comments on this topic are welcome and will be considered.
Classic card games can be categorized in many different ways, which can be a bit confusing, but there is definitely consensus about the trick taking games, like Hearts and Spades, which are most common, the shedding games, like Crazy Eights and Fight the Landlord, and draw and discard games, like Rummy, Gin Rummy and Canasta. A wide variety of these game types can be found at Cardgames.club. Underneath every game, you’ll find a short description of the rules of the game. If you want more information about a game, you can always visit www.pagat.com , which is a great place to explore the rules of thousands of card games.
My master plan is to offer a wide range of card games from around the world. Cardgames.club starts with ten games, most of them from the western world, but you can also find the most popular card game of China: Fight the Landlord. In the future I will still make the most popular games (e.g. Pinochle and Cribbage are high on the agenda), but I will also start wandering around the world to find interesting games. I would also love to hear from you about your favorite games. The main goal of the website is to offer visitors a chance to learn a new game in a relaxed way. This educational intention probably comes from my background as a teacher. Your only competition will be computer bots, that will not lose their head whether they beat you, or you beat them.
For the longer term, I am also planning the make a mobile app, or several apps, of the games here, but I will first have to do some serious studying before this can be accomplished. My programming skills are not good enough yet.
Finally, Cardgames.club is a work in progress. Although I want to keep things as simple as possible, there is still a lot of room for improvement, e.g. animations could be smoother, the mobile version is not yet finished, there might even be a small bug here and there. But please realize Cardgames.club is a work in progress and although it will never become perfect, it will become bigger and better over time. With your help, your feedback, your comments, it will become a much better place to play traditional card games. So please get in touch at support@cardgames.club.