Long distance card games

Why cards, and not something with explosions

Compared to action games, card games give just enough challenge to not get bored, but enough breathing room to focus on what the other person is saying. That is the entire case for them. You cannot hold a conversation through a shooter. You can hold one through a hand of Gin Rummy, and the game keeps going while you do.

Two of you gets one on one time: Gin Rummy, Crazy Eights, Speed. Four of you can double date with friends, which is Spades if two pairs want to be partners, or Go Fish and Rummy if you would rather everyone played for themselves.

Long distance couples go looking for a couples card game, or card games for long distance relationships, and find quizzes about each other. Many of those are fine and none of them is a game. The best game for couples is the one you both love already: a couple who played Gin Rummy before they lived apart does not need a new game, they need the old one on two screens.

Nothing here is trying to fix your relationship. The long distance relationship games that promise to deepen your connection are a different aisle, and the challenges of living apart are real ones a deck of cards does not solve. What a game does is give you something to do together, which on a flat evening is really the only thing that will help. You get competitive, you stop noticing the distance for an hour, and a game beside a call is better than a call that has run out of things to say.

A deck of cards, not a deck of questions

Search for long distance card games, or LDR card games, and almost everything that comes back is a physical box of conversation prompts for couples. Those decks are fine at what they do, which is ask you questions you would not otherwise ask. They are not a game, though, and somebody has to post them to you.

Card games to play long distance should be the ordinary games, with suits and ranks and a discard pile: Gin Rummy, Rummy, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Speed and Spades. Nothing to buy, nothing to post, nothing new to learn if you both played these before you lived apart. Two people in two cities open a page each and the full deck is already on the table.

Connected by Cards is aiming to eventually have all the games you can play with a deck, or a few decks, of cards. Thirty-seven of them play with friends today.

Two people, two places, one table

One of you opens the table and gets the link for the other seat. Drop it however you already talk: a message, an email, straight into the call you are already on. They open it, they are dealt in. No account, no app, no password to agree on, and neither of you has to be the technical one. The table is private: nobody sits down without your link.

You can turn voice on before you make the table, and it stays off until you do. The audio usually goes straight between the two of you, which shows each of you the other’s IP address, and through a Cloudflare relay only when a direct route fails. Nothing is recorded. Or ignore it entirely and keep the video call you were already on: a card game in a browser tab sits beside a call rather than replacing it.

Why not just use an app? Because then you both have to have it. Here nobody installs anything and nobody makes an account, and your partner does not need the same phone, the same store or the same anything as you. One link, two browsers, and you are dealt in. Looking for phone games for couples long distance? This is one, in the phone’s browser, with nothing to install.

When one of you has to go to bed

Time zones end games early. A table here waits 48 hours, so an unfinished match is not lost because somebody had to sleep. Each game keeps a short list of the tables your browser is still sitting at, and you click back in through it.

That list is local to the browser that made or joined the table, because there are no accounts and so nothing to sync. Worth knowing before you switch devices: a match started on a laptop will not appear on your phone. Send yourself the link and it will.

And if they are asleep and you are not, every one of the thirty-seven games also plays the computer, on its own page, so the night does not have to end when the call does.

A third kind of couples card game, and only this table has it

There are usually two kinds of card game for couples. The pop quiz kind, where you draw a card and answer serious and "serious" questions about each other. And the kind you actually play, Crazy Eights or Gin Rummy, which is what we deal here.

There is a third choice at this table, and nowhere else: a tarot reading, something a bit more mysterious, and in our opinion an excellent long distance date night. Neither of you needs to know how to read tarot. First you decide who reads and who gets the reading, then you begin. The person being read picks the cards and lays them on the spread face down, and as the reader turns each one over, an open book under the cards, on the reader’s side only, says what that card means where it landed, how it works with the cards beside it, and what to take from it.

Maybe the cards offer answers no pop quiz does. Maybe it is all fun and games. Either way it is an hour of talking about the two of you with something on the table, the call running, and a reading that waits 48 hours if one of you has to stop.

Which game for which kind of call

Short call, or one of you is cooking. Speed, because there are no turns and a round is over fast. Or Crazy Eights, which you can explain in one sentence to somebody who has never played cards on a screen.

A whole evening, or a date night where the game is the date. Gin Rummy. A match to a hundred points is several rounds, and every round holds the same decision: knock now with ten deadwood, or push for gin and risk being undercut. It is the best of the lot once you both know it, and it rewards two people who are competitive with each other.

More than two of you, in more than two places. Go Fish or Rummy, where the host picks two, three or four seats before the deal, so a family in three cities gets one link each. Go Fish is the fun one with a child in the room. Spades if there are exactly four of you.

A standing arrangement of one game a night is easy to keep, easier than a plan that needs you both free at the same hour, and it is one of the few things you get to do at the same moment. Dates like that create a reason to come back tomorrow. It is free, give or take an occasional ad we will try to keep discreet.