World of Card Games

The server was updated this morning to apply some changes.

In Gin Rummy, you can now click the "sort" button to sort your cards from left to right or vice versa, by rank.

The sort button toggles between ">" and "<"

Also in Gin Rummy, when you pick a card, it will get added to the right of your hand. This suggestion was made by someone who uses the site on a tablet. It's easier to move a card when you can grab the entire thing and not just an edge. I hope this change won't disturb others too much. I usually dislike making changes to the user interface, but I think the pluses outweigh the minuses, in this case.

[Edit: I see only negative comments below... is there anyone who uses a tablet and likes the new placement that puts your picked card to the right? Feedback from all is welcome!]

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.

About a week ago, someone reported to me that they tried to download a hand history in Internet Explorer, but a problem occurred - the file was not correctly downloaded.

It turns out that there was a problem with this download in both Internet Explorer and Edge (two common Windows browsers).

As of this morning, the problems have been fixed. So you should now be able to download hand histories for Euchre, Hearts, Spades, and Pinochle.

Click here to download previous hand history

floppy disk icon

Some people like to download hand histories so they can review what happened in the previous hand. They are also useful when reporting bad card-playing strategy by the bots. If you want to report such a problem with the bots, it's helpful to me if you email me a copy of the hand history when you saw the problem - that way, I can most easily figure out what went wrong. Without it, it's like searching for a needle in a haystack.

A few days ago, I got a report that the audio alerts no longer functioned in the latest version of Firefox. That means you would not get the "gong" sound when your game started - an important feature!

As of this morning, audio alerts are now restored in Firefox. Thanks very much to the player who reported this issue!

There was a brief outage last night around 7 PM Central US time. It lasted about 10 minutes, and was caused by a network issue at my hosting service. I'm sorry, but there's nothing to be done when this kind of thing happens. I've been pretty happy with this service, but even the best have trouble on rare occasions! I appreciate your patience when such problems occur.

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.