What’s new

Eight new mini-games arrive, the shouting kind: hot potato, chicken (whoever jumps out last without going over the cliff wins), tug of war, Simon says, shell game, whack-a-mole, truth or hoax and spicy cake. That makes forty.

And a new mode picked in the room: "Everyone plays". Every round you all fight at once, in pairs that change, at the mini-game chosen by whoever is last. With an odd number, one player rests and gets a point. The classic mode, one duel at a time with the room betting, is still there as "One at a time".

A new game invented for the house, for parties of 3 to 8. Each round someone challenges another player and picks the mini-game from three drawn at random; the rest of the room bets on one of the two and watches the duel live.

There are thirty-two mini-games in five families: blind (rock, paper, scissors, penalties, gunslingers, battleship...), turn-based (tic-tac-toe, four in a row, sticks...), speed (reflexes, quick maths, memory, colours...), words and luck (push your luck, twenty-one, higher or lower...).

A right bet scores, a right bet against the majority scores double, and the duel winner earns an extra point for every doubter. At the end, the top two play a final that counts double.

A new game invented for the house, for 2 to 6. Everyone holds a hand of tapas, picks one at the same time and in secret, the picks are revealed together and everyone passes the rest of their hand to the left. Whatever you leave, your neighbour gets to eat.

Tortillas come in pairs, croquetas are worth more the more you have, ham is fought over by the slice and prawns want bread. Padrón peppers score, but whoever has the most gets the hot one. Churros are kept until the end: most gains, fewest loses.

And there is the Freeloader: it takes whatever your left neighbour reveals at the same time. Since you know which hand you passed them, you can guess what they will take. Three rounds, six to nine minutes, and the table always shows what everyone would score if the round ended now.

A property game and one of the Conquista maps were set in the world of a fantasy saga that belongs to someone else: its places, its houses and its characters. Although the text and photos were our own or freely licensed, the world is not, so both have been withdrawn.

Conquista carries on with eleven maps, all of them real places. Coins already earned are not affected.

Everyone gets the same secret word except the impostor, who does not know it. In turn, each player gives a short clue - clear enough for their own side to trust them, vague enough that the impostor cannot work it out - and then everyone votes at once on who to throw out. It plays from 3 to 16 people, which is exactly the table no card game reaches.

Getting caught is not the end for the impostor: the last one to fall gets one chance to name the word, and scores anyway if they get it right. The impostors win if they come to equal the civilians still standing, or if the votes run out before they are found. A game is several words in a row, and the points add up.

Before the game starts you choose how many impostors there are - a fixed number, one that follows the size of the table, or a random and secret one, so nobody knows whether they are hunting one or three - whether the impostor gets any help, which category the words come from, how many rounds of clues come before each vote, and whether the impostors know each other. There are 585 words in 19 categories, in both languages.

And in every game: on the closing podium, a long name no longer runs over the one next to it on a phone.

Gangs did not exist before this site. Every night, all at once and in secret, you spread ten thugs across the five districts of the city - the Docks, the Market, the Casino, the Station and the Square. Then the districts are revealed one by one, and each goes to whoever has the most people there. No split wins every time: the winner is whoever best reads where everyone else will go.

Every district plays differently. Whoever already owns a district wins ties in it, so holding what is yours costs less than taking it from someone else. The Casino is worth anything from 0 to 10 points, and nobody knows how much until it is revealed. The Market hands out one-use tricks: backup, a switchblade that makes your thugs count double in one district, an informant who wins you the ties, a bribe that turns half of a rival's thugs to your side, a raid that leaves a district with no winner that night, or a double-or-nothing.

A game lasts seven nights and the last one counts double. Whoever is in last place gets two extra thugs and whoever is leading loses one, so the result is not settled halfway through. The bots picture how their rivals will split before they decide, so they do not leave districts lying around for free.

Bombazo, for 2 to 8: there are bombs in the deck, and whoever draws one without a way to defuse it is out. You play cards to attack the next player, skip your turn, draw from the bottom, see what is coming or shuffle, and after every play there are a few seconds in which anyone can shout "No!" to cancel it (and someone else "No!" to cancel that). The deck scales with the number of players.

Liar's Dice (Dudo), for 2 to 8: everyone sees only their own dice, and you bid on how many of a face there are across every cup at the table, with ones wild. The next player raises the bid, shouts "Dudo!" if they think it is a lie, or "calzo" if they think it is exact. You choose whether to start with 5 dice or 3 - at a big table, 3 is the right call - and whether to play the palifico round.

Intriga, for 2 to 6: bluffing at court. Everyone holds two characters face down and can claim to be anyone to use their power. The others have a few seconds to challenge or block: if the claim was a lie, the liar loses a character, and if it was true, the challenger does. The last player with one left wins. The cards carry real portraits, public-domain paintings by Massys, Artemisia Gentileschi, Titian and Leonardo, each with its credit.

Spain's rummy, for 2 to 6. Seven cards, sets and same-suit runs, and you close when at most one loose card worth 5 or less is left. Closing with everything melded takes ten points off, and a chinchón - seven cards in a row of the same suit - wins the whole game on the spot. With five players or more it is played with two decks, because one does not have enough cards to deal.

When someone closes, the table does the counting for you: it combines every hand the way that leaves the fewest points and lays your loose cards onto the closer's melds, which is what starts most arguments at a real table. You choose to play to 100 or to 50 points, and whether whoever goes over can buy back in.

While you play, each melded card carries a coloured bar and each loose one what it costs you, and a line tells you which card would let you close or why you cannot yet. Under each rival you can see what they have taken from the discard, the clue a real table has to keep in its head.

On every board, pointing at a region - in the "Regions and bonuses" list, in the reinforcement chips or at its name on the map - lights the whole of it and dims the rest of the world, so you can see at a glance which territories you have to put together to collect its bonus.

The thirteenth game in the house is not played with a deck of cards: it is played on a map. Conquista is a turn-based territory game for 2 to 6 people, with reinforcements, dice, territory cards and one way to win: being the only player left holding ground.

There are eleven maps and all eleven are playable: Spain (52 territories, all fifty provinces plus Ceuta and Melilla), World (42), North America (30, the United States by state and Canada by province), Europe (25), Asia (24), the Americas (21), Africa (21), the Mediterranean (21, under its ancient names), Oceania (19), Iberia (19, Spain by region) and the Canaries (14, built for tables of two to four). The map is picked before the game starts, and at a public table it is voted on like any other house rule.

You also choose whether the starting armies are scattered for you or placed by hand in rotation, and whether card sets escalate in value with every set handed in at the table or always pay the same.

Before the game starts you also choose who decides the defender’s dice: automatic, which always rolls the maximum and keeps battles running back to back, or as on the board, stopping the game to ask whoever is being attacked.

You can talk during the game: the Diplomacy panel brings the room chat to the table, which is where truces get agreed. As in the classic game a pact binds nobody: the table never stops you attacking anyone.

Every board is drawn with real coastlines: the countries and provinces come from a public-domain atlas, so Alaska is Alaska and Castile and León is the shape it actually is. It is played by touching the map - placing, attacking and regrouping are taps on territories - with zoom and drag for the big board on a phone. The dice are always rolled by the server.

Playing against the computer has been possible since day one, but the button only lived on the home page and on Quick Play. Anyone arriving from a search for "liar card game rules" landed on that game's page, read how it works, and found a single form for creating a room - meaning they needed to round up other people first. You had to guess the bots were on a different page.

Now all twenty rules pages and all twenty play pages carry their own button, and it deals that game: one click from finishing the rules to playing, with no sign-up and nobody to wait for.

The redrawn deck - court cards, suits, back and joker - ships in this batch too.

The court cards were stick figures: a rectangular torso, a round head with two dots for eyes, and the same face on all twelve cards, recoloured by suit. The knight looked like a giraffe standing on a table. They have all been drawn again from scratch.

The king and the knave of a suit are now two different people - the king bearded and long-haired, the knave young and clean-shaven - each in his own two-colour clothes, and the knight rides a horse with a neck, a croup, hocks and a mane. The faces have brows, eyelids, a nose and lips; the cloth has folds and hatched shading, the way an engraving does.

The suits have been redrawn as the objects they actually are: the coin is minted, with a milled edge; the cup is a chalice with a foot and a knop; the sword has a fuller and quillons; and the club is a branch with the stubs of its cut limbs. On the number cards swords and clubs cross, as they do on a real Spanish deck, and the cups no longer stand upside down on the lower half.

The French deck gets the same treatment: its kings, queens and jacks are double-headed, with a sash and an attribute of their own - the sword, the flower, the halberd. There is a matching new joker too.

All seven card backs from the shop have been redrawn by the same hand, so the backs across the table and the faces in your hand are one deck again: the same wobbled double rule, the same corner flourishes, and in the medallion the same four suits the cards carry. Each back keeps its own colours and its own field pattern, which is what tells them apart - what changed is the drawing, not what you bought.

No line has a constant thickness and no two are quite alike: every card is drawn with its own hand. That is what stops the deck looking like it came out of a machine, which is exactly what it looked like.

Every "play" page now explains what the host settles before the deal - that game’s real options, with their values - and what a first game tends to teach you: how long the turn clock is, what the table does when it runs out, and what the interface will not let you do however hard you try.

Checking the text against what the games actually do turned up two things described wrongly. The Continental rules said this version does not allow taking the discard out of turn, and it does: that is the steal, it costs a penalty card, and it is there in every hand. It is now explained, along with the round of offers on the discard, which was not written down anywhere either.

The other one: the El Presi page said cards that are not legal plays appear dimmed. They do not. What stops an invalid play is the play button staying disabled until the selection is right.

The Quick Play pages now cover two things that were not written anywhere: that house rules on a public table are voted for rather than decided by a host, and exactly what happens if you walk out of a public game halfway through.

Forming a combination took the cards out of your hand and sent them up to the table area, looking exactly like the combinations already in play. It read as though you had already thrown them down with no way back, and the button that undid it sat on the other side of the screen.

Now the combinations you are building stay in your own tray, right above your hand, and tapping one sends its cards back to your hand. A line makes it clear they are not on the table yet.

Going down is the part that is final - once per hand - so the table now asks first and shows you exactly which cards are leaving.

This is a game that spreads because somebody passes a room to their friends on WhatsApp or Discord, and until now any link to the site showed up there as a bare line of text.

Every page now has its own preview image: one per game, in both languages, with the house card fan and felt.

The rules, the strategy pages and the site pages were already translated, but the language was a switch inside the page and there was not a single English address. English now lives under /en, with 26 pages of its own, and every page links to its counterpart in the other language.

On performance: the home page is served already drawn rather than assembled in the browser, the fonts come from the site itself, and all the text travels compressed from the origin. On a phone what you notice is how long the first screen takes to appear.

All ten table themes were gone through one by one looking for text that fell below a legible contrast ratio, the light ones especially. The card fan was fixed too - on narrow screens it hung off both edges.

If you lose your connection the site no longer shows the browser error: a page of its own explains what happened. What it does not do is pretend you can play offline, because the games live on the server.

Starting a game used to need people: three for Quick Play, two for a private room, and the only way to play against the machine was to create a room and add bots one at a time. There is now a button that sits you at a table with bots directly.

On phones, your hand stopped running off the screen: instead of one row you had to scroll sideways, the cards are spread over several rows and all of them are visible. The small buttons were made big enough to hit with a finger.

El Cuadrado was corrected too: at the start of the round you choose which two cards you look at. It used to show you two fixed ones, which is not how the game is played.

Every game now has a full rules page: the deal, the turn, scoring, playing advice and the questions that come up most. They are not "the official rules" - for games like El Presi or Dedo Cagado there are none - but exactly what the table does when you play here, simplifications included where there are any.

The about, contact and privacy pages were added at the same time.

The last community cards came out and the result appeared over them almost immediately, so there was no time to see what the hand had been won with. The river is now dealt with a deliberate pause, long enough to read the board before the verdict lands.