The games people grow up playing — regional classics by the local rules, from Egypt to Italy to the Netherlands. Free, in your browser.
These are the card games people grew up with — the regional classics, played by the rules they are actually played by at home, not a flattened international version. Basra comes from Egypt, Briscola and Scopa from Italy, Cuarenta from Ecuador, Klaverjas from the Netherlands and Schnapsen from Austria.
If you have moved away from where you grew up, this is a way to play the exact game you remember. If a game is new to you, each one teaches itself as you go.
We add more of these regularly, guided by where our players actually are — so the collection grows toward the places people are playing from.
An easy phrase to write, an expensive one to mean. Concretely: these are not one card engine wearing different flags. Half of them do not use the deck you are picturing. Scopa and Briscola run on the Italian forty — no eights, nines or tens, courts named Fante, Cavallo and Re. Cuarenta runs on the Spanish forty: oros, copas, espadas, bastos. Rankings move too. In Briscola the humble three is the second-strongest card in the game, behind only the ace and above every king, so every reflex you built elsewhere now works quietly against you.
Then the obligations, where most ports give themselves away. Klaverjas does not let you play whatever you like: you must follow suit, and on a trump trick you must overtrump when able. That one word — must — deletes a category of strategy anyone raised on Whist, Hearts or Bridge takes for granted, because a trump you are compelled to spend was never yours to hoard. Dou Di Zhu was the hardest build here and the one I came closest to abandoning: the bidding, the sprawling family of legal combinations, two players silently cooperating against one — every layer had to work before any of it worked.
Primiera, in Scopa. Casual versions omit it, or flatten it into "whoever collected the most sevens," and the real thing is stranger and better. Primiera takes your single best card in each of the four suits and scores them on a scale unrelated to rank order — a seven is worth 21, a six 18, an ace 16, every face card only 10 — and you need a card in all four suits to compete at all. That clause vanishes most often, and it is what makes Primiera a decision: a suit you never touched is not a small loss, it is a disqualification. The Scopa guide walks the full stack.
Basra is the clearest case. It is played across Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus — Bastra there — and no two of those tables fully agree. This build runs the Lebanese rules: the Jack sweeps the whole table, the seven of diamonds, Al Komi in Egypt, sweeps as well and is the deck's most valuable card at two points, and the match runs to 101. Whether a Jack sweep should itself count as a basra changes house to house; here it counts. I would rather implement one table's version completely than average four into a version nobody plays. How a card game travels explains why Scopa becomes Escoba; the story of Basra is how I fell into all of this.
The daily turns the calendar date into a single number and seeds the shuffle with it — not your score, not your difficulty, not where you sit. Everyone opening today's deal gets the same cards, which is the only thing that makes a daily score worth comparing. One admission: "new every midnight" invites the question of whose midnight, and my position is that it should be yours, read off your own device rather than a server. Two more regional games sit on the card shelf, not this one — Euchre from the American Midwest and Shpella, an Albanian partnership game with essentially no decent online version anywhere. That absence is why it exists.