Online Card Games With Friends
Lately, I have been obsessed with playing games with friends online — for free! I wonder why? It is just shocking how many people my age don’t own a gaming computer. Never the less, we successfully managed to get all 5 of us into playingcards.io and play a game of gin rummy. Here’s a tip, if you drag the cards into stacks on the table top, playingcards.io will put a counter next to each stack. If you grab the stack by that counter, you can pull the whole stack into your hand.
At the end of that session, my buddy Paul found a new website, because he wanted to play Hearts. We gave it a whirl. The latest addition to our portfolio of free card fun is: https://www.cardzmania.com/games/
Play multiplayer Rummy and 45+ card games online for free! Enjoy with 2-12 friends or compete globally with 1000s of players using any device. No signup/download needed. The digital card game can be played with friends or via online matchmaking. It allows players to recreate their card drawing fun digitally, just without the stacking rule. Apparently stacking Draw 2 and Draw 4 cards is not officially allowed.
This clever little website is loaded with features, which can make it a bit complicated to get into, but once you are in it is a modern web app that can actually make learning new games easier. Why look at another card game website? Despite the tremendous simplicity of playingcards.io - the platform has some limitations. It is easy to cheat, and if someone online gets up and walks away or loses their connection, you’re kind of hosed. There is no coming back from that.
But with cardzmania, they add nice touches like timers and hints to make the games move faster. They make it easier for new players to pick up the rules with a game like Hearts. Listening to my friend describe the game rules almost put me to sleep. But once we got into the carzmania/games/hearts game, it was easy to understand and play.
The main thing about these games for me is the ability to create a private lobby and send the link to that game to a friend. Thus armed with Zoom, or google Meet (formerly Hangouts) we can chat, see each other, and play the game.
According to cardzmania website:
We love playing card games with friends and family, that's why we created CardzMania. Our goal is to make CardzMania THE best website to play card games without any hassle. You can choose from the many card games we have and play online here for free forever. We hate ads, signups, downloads and flash also, so just wanted to create a clean simple intuitive interface that you can access from any of your devices! All of our solitaire games can be played in multiplayer mode so that you can enjoy those with your friends and family also.
Their commitment to friends and family play is important right now because there are often 5 or 6 of us who want to play. Cardzmania’s main screen shows a list of the many multiplayer games they have availab.e What’s more, they show how many people can play and how long you should expect a round of games to last.
If you scroll down below the fold, you will see even more games.
The big games on this list for me are:
Hearts
Spades
Whist
Euchre
Pinochle
Gin Rummy
Rummy
Crazy 8’s
We have played all of those games at one point or another with our family, so I know first hand they can be fun. The reason I like card games is that they are often inherently social. There’s a lot of talking that goes on around the game, around the hands, the cards, the deals. Card games just prompt conversation.
When you click on a game, you move to the mode screen. I picked classic-mode which gave me four options. I am not going to pretend to be an expert on cardzmania and their global leader boards or anything else about their website. I went straight for private multiplayer session.
To do that you click on Multiplayer mode. Don’t worry about the Compete Globally text. You can safely ignore it.
You will get a chance to host a table, join a table, or find a game. If you are the instigator for your group’s event, you will want to host a table. If you have been invited, you can enter the table number and then you can click and join the game.
If you are the host, you will need to share the table number with your friends. You can do that by copying and pasting the link to the game (my favorite) or you can send your friends the table number and tell them to join you by getting to the join a game screen just like you did.
Each player will be assigned a funny little animal avatar, which I found fun. As everyone finds the table, their animal will show up. When everyone is ready, you can hit the green start button. You can fill in the rest of the table with bots, but I always selected 0 for the bot number.
Online Card Games With Friends
Once the game is going, you will be able to see everyone else and the mechanics of your game will be managed by cardzmania.
We only played a few hands, so we did not see if there was a limit. I did not register or sign in. I just went to the website, hosted a table and invited my friends. There was a tad bit more work than with playingcards.io, but overall trick-taking games are easier with cardzmania.
Caveat There appears to be a paywall with cardzmania. It appears their monetization strategy is to get you hooked playing in global competitions with “coins”. Since I had no interest in that, I paid it very little attention, only digging into it for this article. If you do register with the website they have coins store. However, at no point did I run into a situation playing with friends were I needed coins. I have to admit that we may not have played enough to trigger any paywall nor did we need to register. In total, we played for 30 minutes (two rounds of hearts).
Next week we
How To Play Online Card Games With Friends
I hope you and your friends have as much fun as we did!