Deck shuffler

A pack when the pack is missing

Cards go the way dice go: one falls behind the sofa, a toddler finds the box, and a fifty-two card pack quietly becomes a fifty-one card pack that spoils every game played with it afterwards. A pack on the screen cannot lose a card, and it says how many are left at every point.

It is also the quickest way to play a game whose deck you do not own. Number cards to a hundred, letters for spelling games, colours for turns and teams: choose one, shuffle, deal. Nothing is printed, nothing is cut out, and the same deck is there tomorrow.

Dealing fairly to a table

The deal goes round the table one card at a time, the way a person deals, rather than handing the first player the top five. It makes no difference to the mathematics and every difference to whether anybody believes it, which is exactly why a real dealer does it that way.

Name the players in the Players tab and the hands are labelled with their names instead of Player 1 and Player 2. Those names are the shared roster, so the bag of tokens and every other tool with players reads the same list, and they stay in this browser.

Private hands on one device

A card game where everybody can see everybody's hand is a different game. With private hands turned on, the screen asks for one player at a time: hold the button to see your cards, let go, and pass the device on. Nothing is shown until the next person takes it, and nothing is stored about what anybody was dealt.

That is the whole of what this site means by playing together: one device, passed around, with no rooms and no accounts. When the round needs a clock or a score, the countdown timer and the scoreboard are the pages to open beside it.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.shuffle.deck, pph.shuffle.deal, pph.shuffle.private and pph.shuffle.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.