Draw and discard

The mechanic underneath most card games

Strip away the scoring and the special cards and an enormous number of games are the same three zones: a pile you draw from, a hand you hold, and a pile you play to. What separates them is what a card does when it lands, and that part lives in your rules rather than in a tool.

So this is the three zones and nothing else. It is for playing a game you already know with a deck you do not have, for prototyping a game you are designing, and for classroom games where the cards are questions rather than suits. Write your own list and every card can be a prompt, a word or a task.

Running the pile dry, on purpose and by accident

Most games say that when the draw pile is gone you shuffle the discards and carry on, and this does that automatically, with a notice so nobody misses that it happened. The count of reshuffles is a real number in a lot of games: it is how you know a round has gone long.

Some games end when the pile is empty instead, and for those the table can be told to wait. It will say there is nothing left to draw rather than quietly refilling itself, which is the difference between a tool that follows your rules and one that has its own.

Burning, undo, and the honest history

A burned card is out of the game. Not in the discard pile, not coming back in the next shuffle, gone. Plenty of house rules work that way and a discard pile that quietly returns a burned card would break them without anybody noticing, so the tool keeps burned cards in their own pile and never deals from it.

Undo walks the last dozen moves back, including a reshuffle, and removes them from the history as it goes, because a record that still lists a move nobody made is worse than no record. If what you actually want is the whole deck dealt into hands, the shuffler does that in one move.

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.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.discard.deck, pph.discard.cards, pph.discard.limit, pph.discard.auto and pph.discard.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.