What are the best digital interfaces for playing card games in-person? They have to be good enough to convert people who love faffing about with physical cards (not me).
That's just not the right question to be asking. Not everything needs to be digital. If you think handling physical cards is "faffing about", it's just not for you and that's ok.
Edit: How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun. Yes of course you can play whatever you want online. Call me old fashioned, but 5 dudes at a table playing cards on their phone just grosses me out.
Some of the most entertaining experiences I’ve had are with stupid card decks where the back pattern/image isn’t mirrored. So you could tell eg in Monopoly Deal if someone was holding a dual-colored property card as the card would be held upside down, whereas all other types of cards would only ever be held one way.
Similarly if you play a pack for a while and notice a particular card has a scruff or bend on it. Definitely had that while playing with a friends Uno deck.
Fun times…
But I can definitely appreciate some people wanting to try digital in-person. Games like Codenames take a few minutes to set up (plus shuffle time), and I’d rather spend time playing than doing mundane setup. Would love to see a product that can do it right…!
Having played Gloomhaven on the Steam Game, I cannot _imagine_ spending the setup time on the physical version. But I'd still love to be in-person while playing!
Honestly, same (but even more so) for D&D and other TTRPGs - automate away all the calculation, dice rolls, etc. for me, give me an easily referencable and clickable character sheet with all my options, but let me enjoy my friends' energy face-to-face!
Further to this, I would say that if you want to get together in person and have a digitally mediated gaming experience, even a turn based one, there are of lot of those to be had that are much richer and more interesting in uniquely-digital ways than simply playing an on-screen version of a game that was meant to be a pack of cards— an obvious example is Civ 6: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sid-meiers-civilization-vi/id1...
For me at least, part of the delight of a truly analogue tabletop game is experiencing all the little design tricks that are used to elegantly implement complex game mechanics (scoring, hidden info, turn taking, catch-up, etc) within the constraints imposed by bits of cardboard and plastic. Once a computer is part of the equation anyway, there's no point in any of that, and you might as well just be playing a game that is native to that platform.
> How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun.
For some people. Others (like myself!) actively dislike games where you have to read social cues, and prefer to be able to focus on the explicit (not implicit) game mechanics, keeping their socializing brain separate from (but still active during!) game-playing. Again - other people can enjoy things in other ways to you, and (so long as they're not hurting anyway) they are not wrong to do so.
I'm not saying my way is the right way or your way is the wrong way, I'm asking what's the best way to do things my way (to meet some people I know half way).
I've played cards with friends in person using Trickster Cards (https://www.trickstercards.com) on our phones. It has a very nice, simple UX for friends to join your games and to set various options to lock out randos if you want to. The iOS app is free IIRC and the paid options are mostly if you want to play with others online in more ranked, league-type play.
I've found it nice for situations where everyone is in the same room and physical cards are possible, but one player may need to leave the room to monitor a dish that is slow-cooking or check on kids or work or whatever.
edit: the other time it came in really handy was in conditions adverse to cards (super windy, no table top, etc), but we all really wanted to get some hearts or euchre in :).
It's not a card game, but SpaceTeam is a local digital game that convinced me that there's a lot of unexplored space for in-person digital interaction.
I've wanted to write a Web-based "card table" for some time but there's always some area I am ignorant in and so I have been unable to connect all the dots.
https://tabletopia.com/ seems to be a freemium platform for playing many (all?) commercial boardgames and also many standard card games: hearts, bridge, whist, poker etc. and appears to simulate a tabletop for playing with others or solo. I have not played it much but it seems intuitive as a platform for playing many different boardgames online, but is a bit clunky compared to a purpose-built online game.
Edit: How you're holding and dealing the cards is quite literally part of the game. You can read people by how they fling the cards when dealing or how they rearrange in their hands, etc. It's meant to be a tactile experience. It's part of the fun. Yes of course you can play whatever you want online. Call me old fashioned, but 5 dudes at a table playing cards on their phone just grosses me out.