Learn the rules
How to play
Written for somebody who has never dealt the game before. Every guide names the piles, defines the words, and takes you through to a first completed move — then gives the rules in full, including the awkward ones that only come up when you are stuck.
The guides
6 of 26 games
Which games have a guide
6 of the 26 games on the site have a full guide, and they are the 6 whose rules take the longest to explain — the patience family, Hearts and chess. The other 20 carry a "How to play" section on their own page instead, which is enough for a game whose rules are three sentences: 2048, Snake and Tic Tac Toe do not need two thousand words. Where a game does need them, it gets a guide here rather than a longer game page.
What a guide covers
Each one is in four parts. The steps are the lesson: four to seven of them, in order, from an unfamiliar screen to a move you have actually made. The rules in full is the reference — the edge cases the lesson skipped, what happens when you run out of moves, how the game ends and how it is scored. Questions people ask answers the things that genuinely puzzle a new player, like whether every deal can be won. And every guide opens with a link straight to the board, because reading about a card game is no substitute for holding one.
The rules are checked against the code
Card game rules here follow the standard games as recorded on Pagat, John McLeod's rules archive, and each guide was written against the engine that actually runs the board rather than from memory. Where our version picks one of several published variations — how many times the pack may be turned over, how many cards may be carried at once, whether an empty column takes any card — the guide says which one we picked and why. If a guide and a game ever disagree, one of them is a bug: tell us and it gets a test written for it.
Prefer to just play? Every guide links to its game, or start from all games or the card games.