Cards with Friends
The lowest hand wins. The whole game is knowing when yours is it.
Least Count, playable in your browser. Send a link and play with friends wherever they are, or take on the bots on your own — two to four players, no install, no account, nothing to fill in first.
Count: 12 — low enough to call.
A turn, end to end
Drop a card, take a card, or call it.
That is the entire loop. Everything else is arithmetic and nerve.
Drop
Put down a card you would rather not be holding. Two or three at once if they are the same rank — the fastest way to shed weight.
Take
Draw the top of the deck, or pick up one of the cards just dropped. Match the rank already showing and you take nothing at all, which is the only way your hand actually gets smaller.
Or declare
Think you are lowest at the table? Say so at the start of your turn, before you touch a card. Any count, any time.
Called it right
Nobody is under you. You score nothing, and everyone else writes down what they were caught holding.
Called it wrong
Somebody was strictly lower. You take a flat 70 — enough to lose a match on its own, which is why the call is the whole game.
What a card is worth
Seven cards each. Add them up.
Where it is up to
Built in the open, so here is the honest version.
The full game against bots at three difficulties, and pass-and-play on one device with a handover screen so nobody sees a hand that is not theirs. Rounds stack into a match to 100, 200 or 300; bust the target and you are out. Quit mid-round and it picks up exactly where you left it.
Playing with friends on their own phones. One tap opens a table with the link already on screen — no name to pick, no game to choose, nothing to set up. Send it, and everyone plays from wherever they are — a whole match, with running totals, elimination and a winner. If somebody drops, a bot covers their seat until they take it back. The host picks how long a turn may run when the table opens, so a player who wanders off does not hold up three other people: the turn gets played out for them, and three of those in a row hands the seat over until they say otherwise. You are probably on a call while you play, so sound is off unless you ask for it — and when you do, it is a tone when the turn reaches you, not a soundtrack.
A second game. The engine underneath was written to hold more than one, and the picker goes in the lobby beside the other table settings — changeable right up until somebody deals.
Chat, accounts and rankings. Every finished match is already kept with its players, their totals and the winner, so a ranking has history to start from rather than a blank slate.