World of Card Games

You can now see the pass direction and the number of hands that have been played in Hearts. The pass direction is shown as "<" for left, ">" for right, and "^" for across. If there was no passing, then only the hand count is shown.

Here, the pass direction is right, and it's the first hand of the game

If this feature bugs you, you can turn it off! Click on your user name in the upper right corner, and scroll down in the panel that opens until you get to the "Hide Widgets" line. Check the box next to Hearts, and the feature will turn off.

Turn off the feature by checking "Hide widgets" for Hearts in your User Settings

ranked double deck pinochle games

After this morning's site update, you can now play ranked Double Deck Pinochle games at World of Card Games.

If you enjoy more competitive play, ranked games may be for you. You may want to brush up on your Ace-on-Ace leadback and meld-bidding skills. Please be a good sport! If you are a Pinochle expert, and your partner is playing poorly, don't abuse the chat functionality by being rude. Instead, ask them if they would like some tips. Chatting about strategy while you are playing a game is considered offensive, unless everyone agrees to it. But you can chat freely at a "chat table" after a game, and you can use the site's messaging feature to send short messages to players that you have liked.

By the way, there's a good discussion board, Power Pinochle, for Double Deck Pinochle enthusiasts. You will find many signalling and bidding tips explained there.

The "bots" have been updated in Double Deck Pinochle, so you should notice some improvement in their signalling skills. The bots also got tuned up Euchre.

Here's another major change that you may like: 'notifications' have been added to the site. If you have used Google Calendar, you may have seen these before. A notification is just a tiny popup to let you know about something happening in your browser. At World of Card Games, a tiny popup will appear when your game starts (but only if your browser is in the background)! There's already an audio alert for this event, but a few people have told me that this is not always helpful because their sound is not on.

You can opt out of notifications if you prefer not to get them. Since these types of alerts are built in to your browser, they are not like the annoying pop-ups that some sites have. Your browser can be used to turn them off whenever you like.

Please let me know if you experience any bugs due to the recent update. I plan to update the Pinochle bots with more strategy improvements in the future. If you have any suggestions for improvements you'd like to see, feel free to contact me.

There's now a "tick" audio alert to accompany the hourglass that indicates you are timing out.

This was added to help people who may have been away from their computer when the "gong" sound indicated that the game was starting. If someone doesn't have the browser open to World of Card Games on their desktop when the game starts, they may be timing out while they are doing something else. For example, their browser might be minimized, or they have another browser tab open for reading the news, etc. This new little audio reminder will help to solve that problem.

Thanks to the player who suggested adding this!

With this morning's server update, your cards are now fanned wider by default in Gin Rummy. They look like this, now:

Gin Rummy cards fanned wider

You can go back to the old fanning by unchecking "Fan Cards Wider" in your Settings:

user Settings are opened by clicking your user name

The "Fan Cards Wider" user setting is checked by default.

This is what happens when you uncheck the "Fan Cards Wider" setting:

Gin Rummy with "Fan Cards Wider" unchecked

The server was also updated with some bug fixes. The ability to move your cards around in Gin Rummy had broken in some touchscreen devices. This is now fixed. Also, if you reloaded the web page while sitting at a Gin Rummy table, your cards got resorted. This no longer happens.

Another general bug fix was made so that the F5 key now works to reload the page in your browser when you are sitting at a table.

Finally, the messaging system was broken during last week's update, but it is now functioning again.

A "messaging" feature was added to World of Card Games with this morning's update. It is available to Registered players only. You can now send messages to any Registered players on your liked players list by clicking on the (message) link next to their name in the list:

message your liked players

If you have any messages in your inbox, you will see the number of messages next to your name in the upper right corner. Click that number to pop open a little panel where you can check your messages.

There are limitations to this messaging feature that are described in the rules. For example, messaging cannot be done from a table; it is only possible from the "home page". Your message may not reach its recipient, as explained in the rules. And currently, only 10 messages per day are allowed. Take a look at the rules page for more information.

This feature is experimental. It's intended to help people schedule games with each other, and find each other at the site. If it causes problems, technical or social, it may be removed in the future. Please let me know if you have any trouble with it.

The update also fixed a bug in Go Fish that caused double-clicking on a card to throw an error, breaking the interaction with the game. Also, the bots in Euchre were modified to be more cautious in ordering the up card into their partner's hand.

With this morning's update, the list of tables has been modified so that it is disabled for about half a second while updating. This should help players avoid clicking on the wrong table by accident.

Pause and Continue buttons have been added to public tables. These buttons will be familiar to those who play at private tables. The difference is that at public tables, all players must vote to pause by clicking the Pause button. Also, the pause lasts for 2 minutes only before the game restarts. And if any single player hits the Continue button, the game will restart. This is to avoid inconveniencing someone who does not want to wait.

Pause and Continue buttons

The Pause button will be useful primarily to players who know each other well. It is polite to hit the Pause button if someone requests it, but you should not expect that everyone will agree to do so. Please be polite when requesting it.

There's something new for the Euchre players: I was recently made aware of the "Next" strategy in Euchre. Apparently it's pretty well known to more advanced players. I did a few experiments, and found that the bots did pretty well when using it. So I've added it to their strategy. If you are not familiar with this strategy, please read my post about it. When your partner uses this strategy, you need to play your cards accordingly. So watch for it, and I hope you will enjoy winning more Euchre hands with this technique.

Hand histories are now available in Hearts, so you can take a look at all the cards played after the hand is over. This feature was already available in Euchre, Spades, and Pinochle. If you wish to report a bug in Hearts, please try to grab the hand history, and send it to me along with the bug report. To do this, click the little floppy disk that appears next to your nameplate after a hand. This will download a small text file that contains a link that can be used to show a replay of the hand, with all cards shown. Use this after your game to see how each card was played.

click to download your hand history

This morning's update also contained a bug fix. A few players were having trouble with a "TypeError" message when trying to get to a table. That problem has been fixed.

Also, the Spades bots got a bit of tuning to fix a bug in the way that they cover a nil bid. Thanks to "no bots plz" for reporting this issue (together with the hand history - that helped so much)!

Note: in my previous blog post, I mentioned that I would soon be adding a "decay" to the Elo ratings. I got a few comments from people who just want the Elo rating hidden. I could do this instead. Does anyone care which way this is done? The intent is to encourage people to play, rather than "sitting" on their ratings.

The cards in your hand are now fanned wider in Hearts, Spades, and Double Deck Pinochle. Also, the chat button and chat input are moved closer to your avatar. Here's the new view:
For comparison, here's the previous look:

There are two settings for fanning your cards. I had some feedback that people were misclicking cards because the cards were not clear and separate enough on smaller screens. This change is intended to help with that.

This also helps an issue that was plaguing Double Deck Pinochle players. This game starts with 20 cards in your hand, and the chat bubble would obscure a few of these if you chatted early on in the hand. With your chat bubble moved way over to the left, this should be less of a problem now.

Chat bubble in Double Deck Pinochle

Different card decks have different dimensions, so you may want to try using a new deck if your current one doesn't look as good with the new view.

There's a new setting that lets you see the cards in the trick pile lined up vertically, like this:

Trick cards piled vertically

It's off by default. To turn it on, click on your username in the upper right corner to get to your settings. Check the box for "Pile Cards Vertically", and you'll see it take effect immediately:

Pile Cards Vertically user setting

The default way that the trick cards are piled up can sometimes obscure the card rank. I hope this helps with that problem.

In Euchre and Spades, you can download a hand history. The file can be used to replay the hand of cards that you most recently played.
Now, a similar feature comes to Double Deck Pinochle at World of Card Games. It's a little different though. The people over at Power Pinochle have developed several tools for learning Pinochle. One of them is called the hand animator. Since they've already got this tool in place, I created the Pinochle hand histories so that they can be used together with their free, online tool.

To get your hand history, wait till the hand has finished. You will see a "Power Pinochle" icon appear next to your nameplate (note: this feature is only available to Registered users). Click the icon to download the text file that contains the hand history:

Click Power Pinochle icon to get your hand history

Once you have the history file, just copy the content into the hand animator textbox and hit the Submit button, and then you can follow the gameplay step-by-step.

The hand animator is loaded with a sample history to start, so you can try it out immediately without having to download a hand history. If you have any trouble at all with this, just write to me and I will help.

By the way, since hand histories were introduced, I've had lots of good tips from Euchre players who have sent me hand histories that showed problems with the bot strategies. I really appreciate that! I've implemented a number of changes to make the bots better, based on these bug reports. If you see the bots do something silly in Pinochle, grab the hand history and send it to me, and let me know what went wrong. I hope I can improve the bots for Pinochle this way, too.

In Gin Rummy at World of Card Games, you can now view the size of the stock pile (the stock pile is the pile of cards on the left that are face down).

When you start your game, you will see a small disk containing a question mark next to the stock pile. Click this to reveal the number of cards in the stock pile:

number of cards in the Gin Rummy stock pile is 31

Each game now has its own Chat Lobby at World of Card Games. The lobby is a way for players to meet up, and leave messages for each other. Note: All messages are public!

To get to the Chat Lobby, click on the Menu button at the lower left corner of the game of your choice. In the screenshot below, the Menu button for Double Deck Pinochle is encircled in green. It's where the old Tutorial button used to be (tutorials are now accessed by clicking on the Menu button).

Menu button replaces the Tutorial button

When you click the Menu button, the Menu panel opens. You will see several links displayed. This next screenshot shows the Menu panel for Hearts. There's a link to the Chat Lobby, the Tutorial, a link to play with bots, one to play with people, and one to play ranked Hearts games. Currently only Hearts has ranked games, but some other games will get rankings soon.

If you want to close the Menu panel without clicking any links, click the red/white x in the upper right corner, as shown below.

Menu panel has links to Chat Lobby, Tutorial, etc

You must be a registered player, and logged in, to use the Chat Lobby. As you can see in the next screenshot, leaving a chat in the lobby is very simple. Just make sure your mouse cursor is focused in the long text input near the bottom of the page - this should happen by default. Then, type in your text, and hit the Return (or Enter) key on your keyboard.

How to use the Chat Lobby

Chat lobbies persist for 30 minutes after the last person has left them, and the lobby holds a total of 200 chat messages. Because likes and dislikes apply in lobbies, just like at regular game tables, there may be more than one lobby for your game. If you don't see the person you are looking for in the first lobby where you go, you can click the "next" link at the bottom of the screen to get to any other lobbies for that game. If there are no more, you will get an error message.

Chat lobbies are completely new, so please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or additional features, or if you see any problems with them. I hope this new feature helps people more easily find each other at the site.

If you're one of those players who hates the "Stick the Dealer" (STD) rule in Euchre at World of Card Games, you now have an option to avoid it.

Stick the Dealer option

Open your "Options" for Euchre. The new option is called "Stick the Dealer". By default, it is set to "Either". It is the least restrictive option. If you keep it this way, you'll be seated most quickly, at any Euchre table, no matter whether the rule is applied or not. If you are first to the table, the STD rule is applied.

If you really like the STD rule, you may want to click "Yes" for this option. This means you will be seated only at tables where the STD rule applies. If you are first to the table, the STD rule is applied.

If you strongly dislike the rule, click "No" for this option, and you'll be seated at tables where the rule is not applicable. If you are first to the table, the STD rule is not applied.

Note that Euchre tables where STD is applied are shown with the notation 'std' in the list of tables. In the screenshot below, the ranked Euchre table has STD applied, while the unranked one (which is for Registered Players Only - 'reg only') does not:

STD applies at all ranked Euchre games

If you are seated at a Euchre table, and you want to know whether the STD rule is enforced, just click the "table info" link in the lower left corner. It will show you all the options that apply to the game:

Euchre table info shows Stick the Dealer option

There were a few other updates this morning.

The Euchre bots have been tinkered with, so they should play a little better now. If you see them make a particularly bad move, you can always send me the hand history so I can look into the problem.

The Pinochle bots had a problem with their meld bids, and this should now be fixed as well.

In Hearts, the rule for who gets points when shooting the moon has been modified. Now, points are deducted from the shooter's score, unless adding points to the other players' scores keeps (or puts) the shooter in first place.

There's also a new "welcome" banner that can be clicked to find out more about ranked tables. You can play ranked Hearts games already. Rankings will come to other games in the next few months.

This morning, the server was down for a brief time in order to apply some updates.

Registered players can now chat after their game has finished at World of Card Games! After the game finishes, you will now see three buttons: "Home", "Chat", and "Play ..." (see screenshot below).

Click Chat button to chat with the Registered players after your game

Clicking the "Home" button takes you back to the main home page, where you can decide what new game you want to play. Clicking the "Play ..." button takes you directly to a new game of the same type that you just finished (for example, Hearts or Spades).

Clicking the "Chat" button takes you to a "chat" table where only the registered players from the game you just finished are invited. This gives you time to discuss the game in as much detail as you like, should you care to do so. The "Chat" button goes away after 30 seconds, so be sure to use it as soon as possible if you are interested in a chat with your group of players. Caveat: No one is obliged to go to the chat table, so you may find that no one joins you there.

If any who played with you goes to the chat table after your game is finished, this chat table will show up in the list of tables. Here's a screenshot of how to recognize it:

"chat" table shows up in the list of tables

Another new feature is the ability to save your "hand history" in Spades. The hand history is already familiar to those who play Euchre. Registered players can download the history of their previous hand, and replay it in the browser to review all the cards played, one step at a time. In Euchre, this feature can be a nice tool to discuss strategy. It is also very useful to report bugs in the bots to me. I'm hoping Spades players will find it useful as well. Sometimes, people report problems with the bots, but it's too time-consuming for me to figure out just what happened. With this new feature, if the bots make a boneheaded mistake, you can grab the hand history and send it to me with a description of what went wrong. I will be more likely to fix a problem when I know exactly what happened, and can reproduce the issue.

To download the hand history, click the old-fashioned "floppy disk" icon that appears next to your avatar after a hand has finished. You can see what it looks like in the screenshot here.

Click the floppy disk icon to download the hand history in Spades

Hm, I can't believe I just called a floppy disk "old-fashioned"! :)

Another important change: at ranked tables, the Elo ratings now reward the first-place player only. Elo ratings in Hearts was discussed in the previous blog post. I did not receive a lot of feedback, one way or the other, about this... but most players appear to like the idea, so I've made the change. I will continue to keep track of any feedback on the issue. Please post to Facebook or Twitter or here on the blog if you have comments. (FYI: anonymous posts are not treated very seriously; anyone can post anonymously multiple times, so I don't consider them to be so useful.)

You can now play ranked Hearts card games at World of Card Games. There are more details at that link, so take a look there if you are interested.

I've added two different rankings - an "Elo rating" and a "Skill rating" -

Elo rating and Skill rating

If you are eligible to play at a ranked table, you'll see the "ranked" table in the list of tables panel. Click on a seat to be taken to the table.

a ranked table in the list of tables with 3 seats available, note purple color

Bots are unavailable at ranked tables until near the end of the game, so I expect that it may be difficult to get a ranked game going, especially for players outside the US time zone [Edit: as of Oct 3 2015, bots may be invited as soon as someone drops out]. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to rank individuals against bots, though, since they don't have expert levels of skill.

There are several advantages to playing at a ranked table: because quitting a table has a more serious penalty than simply taking a loss, it can be hoped that players will be less likely to quit. In addition to your Elo rating taking a hit, quitting gets you banned from ranked tables for 4 hours. This means that you should find more reliable players at the ranked tables, on average.

I'll be playing at the ranked Hearts tables on and off during the day, and look forward to hearing from people about their experiences with it.

If you experience any problems or bugs after this update, please let me know. There were some major changes!

Registered players can now "replay" a hand of Euchre at World of Card Games!

At the end of each hand, you will see the image of a floppy disk appear next to your avatar. It looks like this:

replay Euchre hand history

When you click on that icon, a file will be downloaded to your computer. The file contains a link to the replayer at World of Card Games. When you paste that link into your browser address bar, you will be taken to the Euchre replayer at World of Card Games. With the click of a button, you are taken through every step of the hand, with all the cards shown.

Here's a sample link so you can try it: a case where I got lucky and our opponents were "euchred".

I've made this change along with a few bug fixes today. I hope the Euchre players will enjoy this new feature!

A few weeks ago, I modified the Spades layout so that cards would be fanned more widely. I'd already done this for Hearts, at the request of a player who was having trouble playing cards using a stylus on a tablet.

After the change, several players wrote to tell me that they liked it better the previous way! Now you have a choice (in Hearts and Spades only): you can "Fan Cards Wider" or more compactly; it is up to you. The screenshots below demonstrate how to do this: Just uncheck "Fan Cards Wider" in the Settings panel. This panel appears when you click your user name in the upper right corner:

default card fanning

compact card fanning

In the screenshot, you see another new setting. You can now select which card games you want to see in the "list of tables". If you never play Go Fish, and don't want to see it in the list, just uncheck that box in the "List of tables" user setting.

I hope you enjoy these new features!

I applied some fixes and updates to the server this morning.

First, it is now possible to store up to 4 extra private table names. I've written a separate blog post about this.

Double Deck Pinochle was recently introduced at World of Card Games. Immediately, I got some reports of performance issues with the game when played on Internet Explorer! I believe I have fixed this. If you had trouble before, give it a try and let me know if you still have trouble.

I also got comments that the cards in DD Pinochle are usually sorted with the high cards to the right. I've changed the game accordingly. I hope it will not be too confusing to beginners who may have become accustomed to the old sort order!

Also for DD Pinochle: if you click the "Show Meld" button, you are now shown the total of your meld:

Show Meld view now displays total meld points

This should speed up the bidding process. Please remember that when clicking the "Show Meld" button, you are only shown melds in your hand that do not require a trump suit to be chosen. This means you will not see "royal marriages" or "runs". It would get confusing showing runs - what if you had a run in two different suits? It's the same for royal marriages.

I've made some elements of the "Meld View" larger. This is what you see once trump has been chosen. Here's an example:
Previously, all types of melds were listed to the left of the "mini-cards", even if you had none of those melds. Now, as you can see, meld types are shown only if you have them. For example, in the screenshot above, Guest #48 has 1 run, 1 clubs marriage, and 1 kings around. Aces around, etc., are not listed because she has none. Please let me know if you have any trouble with this new, larger format.

I've had a few players suggest that it would be nice if more than one private table name could be stored. For example, a player might have one private table name that they share with their family, and another with a group of friends. Wouldn't it be nice if they could see both private tables in the "list of tables"?

Now they can! Caveat: you must be registered for this feature to be available to you.

First, click the Options button to bring up your options settings, and click the  "(more)" link next to your primary private table name:

more link

This brings up a new small panel. You can enter up to 4 different private table names here:

Up to four extra private table names allowed

In the example above, a player has selected private table names 'my family' and 'my friends' for Double Deck Pinochle. If they click directly on the Double Deck Pinochle game panel from the home page, they will go directly to the 'my family' table - because this is their "primary" private table name. But if they click on the "list of tables" link in the lower left corner, they will see any private tables with those two names:

extra private tables show in list of tables

Double Deck Pinochle is now available at World of Card Games! It's a 4-player game that combines pattern-matching abilities (think Gin Rummy) with teamwork (think Spades). The rules are described at the Pagat website.

double deck pinochle

As usual, there's a tutorial to get you started (click on the "Tutorial" button to the lower right of the Double Deck Pinochle panel on the main page). You might also want to read my Double Deck Pinochle page for beginners.

If you have not played this game before, you may want to play with robots first, to get comfortable before playing with real live humans.

I've tested the game quite a lot, but there could be bugs. If you try the game and find any problems, please let me know by sending an email to me -  marya@worldofcardgames.com - or leave a comment here.