The Pope Joan card game, online and free

Parlett's rules, and a hand from the first lead to the stop

Pope Joan is an English game of the eighteenth century: the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest reference is from 1732, and Dickens has a hand of it in The Pickwick Papers a century later. The rules here are David Parlett's modern default set from his Pope Joan page, and nothing from the 1847 Hoyle text or the optional variants he lists is mixed in. The pack is a standard 52-card pack with the eight of diamonds taken out, 51 cards, so the seven of diamonds stops every time it is played. Ace is low, king is high. The cards go round to every player and one spare hand, and the last card dealt is turned face up: its suit is the reward suit, the trump suit in the older books, and the card stays where it was dealt.

The player after the dealer leads the lowest card they hold in any suit, and the player holding the card above it in that suit plays it, wherever they sit, and so on up the suit in rank order. Say you lead the four of clubs. Computer 2 holds the five and plays it. Nobody has the six, because it is sitting in the spare hand, so that is a stop, and Computer 2 leads again with the lowest card of any suit it likes. The table says what stopped the run each time: the king, a card out of play, or the missing eight of diamonds. The first hand emptied ends the deal.

Five cards pay. The ace, king, queen and jack of the reward suit each take their own pot, and the nine of diamonds, the Curse of Scotland in the old nickname, takes Pope. Two combinations pay as well. Play the jack of the reward suit and then its queen, from your own hand, back to back, and Intrigue is yours; the queen and then the king the same way is Matrimony. If the jack comes from one player and the queen from the next, nobody collects, and the pot sits on the board for the next deal.

The board: eight pots on the felt, no printable, no antique

The old board is a round tray with eight named compartments, and most of what ranks for this game is about the antique ones. Parlett's own advice is to rule a sheet of paper into eight sections and label them, which is all a board is. We do that on the felt: eight pots, labelled for the ace, king, queen and jack of the reward suit, Pope, Matrimony, Intrigue, and First out, which the rule books call Game. The count on each pot changes as it is dressed and claimed.

The dealer dresses the board alone, fifteen counters every hand: six to Pope, two each to Matrimony and Intrigue, one to each of the other five pots. The other players pay nothing at the deal, and if the turn-up is a pay card its pot goes to the dealer before a card is led. Whatever is not claimed stays on the board and the next dealer adds another fifteen on top, six of them to Pope, so a Pope nobody has played for four hands is worth twenty four counters to whoever finally lays the nine.

First out takes the First out pot and one counter for every card left in each opponent's hand. A player still holding the unplayed Pope pays nothing for their cards. Counters are a running score, not money: a fresh table starts every player on a hundred, the dealer's fifteen comes off their score at each deal, and a score can go below zero.

Three to eight on a link, or the computers, and a seed that repeats a deal

Two ways to sit down. Make a room, choose three to eight seats, and the table gives you a link for each of the others; every seat has to arrive before the first card goes out, because the whole pack is dealt at once. Or take the computer table, where seat one is you and the rest are computers that choose from their own hand and the pots and nothing else; neither your hand nor the spare hand is ever read. Leave automatic turns ticked and they play at about a card a second.

Every deal at the computer table carries a seed, a whole number in the box next to the player count. Type one in, press New table, and you get that exact deal at that player count, so a hand worth a second go is one number long. Next deal keeps the scores and the unclaimed pots, moves the dealer one seat on, and takes the next seed up. A room has no seed at all: the shuffle is the server’s, so nobody at the table can see it coming, and the match runs until a seat holds a hundred and fifty counters or the tenth hand ends it.

A high contrast switch sits at the top of the computer table for anyone who finds the felt hard to read: it strips the colour and gives every playable card a black border and an underlined label, and every card and pot carries its symbol and name as text anyway. At the computer table nothing is kept between visits, so a closed tab is a finished table, scores and all. A room waits forty eight hours instead, and the list on this page brings you back to it. Free to play, and if an ad shows up from time to time, discreet is what we are aiming for.

Pope Joan against Newmarket, at the same felt

Same family of stops games, both dealt here for three to eight players, different board. In Newmarket the ace is high, the four pay cards never change, and every player puts a counter on each pot with the dealer paying two. In Pope Joan the ace is low, the turn-up picks a new reward suit every hand, the dealer alone pays and pays fifteen, and Intrigue, Matrimony and Pope give you a run to plan for. Newmarket takes one hand to learn. Pope Joan is the one we would rather keep playing, because the board is different every deal and Pope keeps growing until somebody plays the nine of diamonds.