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Draw and discard
Draw from the top, play to the discard, and the discards shuffle back in when the pile runs dry.
Made by the PaperCarnival team · Updated
52 to draw, 0 discarded
Draw pile
Discard pile
Your hand, 0 of 7
Nothing in hand yet
Which deck
The usual pack: four suits, ace to king, no jokers.
Load a saved deck
Nothing saved on this device yet. Build a deck on the deck builder and it turns up here.
Two or more of your own replace the deck above. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.
Hand limit
An empty draw pile
Shuffling itself is how most games play. Waiting is for the games where running out is the ending.
Sound
A knock as a card is drawn and a duller one as it is played. Every move is written on screen as well.
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.
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.
Kept in this browser under pph.discard.deck, pph.discard.cards, pph.discard.limit, pph.discard.auto and pph.discard.muted, and nowhere else. Accounts, printing, storage and what the page loads are answered on the FAQ.
Questions
- What happens when the draw pile is empty?
- The discard pile is shuffled and becomes the new draw pile, and the page says so before it deals the next card. That is how most card games handle it. If your game ends when the pile runs out instead, switch the table to wait for you and it will stop rather than refill.
- Can I undo a move?
- Yes, the last dozen. Undo puts the piles back exactly as they were, including a reshuffle, and takes the move out of the history at the same time so the record stays honest.
- What does burning a card do?
- It takes the card out of the game completely. Burned cards never come back, not through a reshuffle and not through the discard pile, which is exactly what a house rule that removes a card means.
- Does it keep the game if I refresh?
- The deck you chose and your settings come back, but the piles start fresh. A game held halfway through a shuffle is more likely to be a stale tab than a game somebody wanted back, so the table deals a new one.
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