Cards and decks

What a deck on a screen is for

Two things go wrong with a real pack of cards. It loses one, which nobody notices until the game is half played, and it is never the deck the game in front of you actually needs. A deck on a screen fixes both: it cannot lose a card, it counts itself out loud, and it can be a standard fifty-two, a hundred numbered cards or a set you wrote in the last thirty seconds.

What it cannot do is feel like cards, and there is no point pretending otherwise. These tools are for the jobs paper cards are bad at: an honest shuffle, a deal nobody can argue with, and a hand only one person is allowed to see.

Where each one fits in an evening

Start with the deck shuffler when all you need is an honest shuffle and a deal: pick a deck, deal two to eight hands, and either leave them face down or pass the device round so each player sees their own in private. The draw and discard pile is the same deck with the rest of the game attached, a discard that can be reshuffled and an undo for the card that went down by mistake.

Three of them exist to hand somebody something only they may see. Secret role cards deal a role each for a hidden-role game, hidden information cards give out missions and secret words, and turn-order cards settle who goes first without an argument. The random event deck is the one that interrupts a game rather than running it, and the deck builder is where a deck you want again next week gets saved.

One device, and nothing kept

Everything here runs on the single device in front of you. There are no rooms, no invitations and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through. Private hands work by passing the screen round the table, with a hold-to-see button so nothing is left on display when it changes hands.

Cards you write yourself and the names in your roster are kept in this browser and nowhere else. They are never uploaded and never put into a share link, which carries the deck you chose and the shape of the deal and nothing more.

That is also why a deck worth keeping has to be saved rather than sent. The deck builder writes it into this browser and can export it as a file you keep, which is the only way to move a deck to another device when there is no account anywhere to move it through.