Retro card games

Before every phone shipped with a deck built in, card games on a computer were serious software. Publishers hired world champions as consultants, printed thick rulebooks, and sold single-purpose programs that did one thing extremely well. This collection brings together the solitaire compilations, bridge tutors, blackjack trainers and poker simulators that filled the shelves through the DOS years, and each of them runs straight from this page.

Hoyle Classic Card Games is the natural first stop, because it is not one game but a whole cupboard of them: crazy eights, gin rummy, hearts, old maid and more, all played against cartoon opponents with their own habits and tells. Solitaire's Journey goes the other way and specialises, offering more than a hundred solitaire variants tied together by a tournament structure, so a game usually dismissed as idle time-filling turns into a long campaign with a scoreboard.

Bridge, blackjack and poker at expert level

The serious end of the collection is remarkable. Bridge Champion with Omar Sharif, MVP Bridge and Bridge Master were built as genuine teaching tools, walking you through bidding conventions and defensive play hand by hand rather than simply dealing cards. Blackjack is represented by Edward O. Thorp's Real Blackjack and Ken Uston's Professional Blackjack, both named after the mathematicians and players who worked out how the game can actually be beaten, and both willing to tell you exactly where your strategy went wrong.

Poker fans get five-card stud, seven-card stud and several video poker machines, including Stanford Wong's and Dr. Wong's Jacks, which model payout tables precisely enough to be used as practice. Two outliers round the set off: Magic: The Gathering brings the collectible card boom to the screen, and Arcomage is the small, addictive castle-building card duel that hid inside a role-playing game and quietly outlived it.

Everything starts in your browser. Choose a title, give the emulator a few seconds to load, and deal. No installer, no plugin, no account, no registration, nothing saved to your machine - just the game, the keyboard or the mouse, and the controls listed on each game page.