I have an aunt who really, really misses her weekly bridge games with her club. The thing is, they’re all old (85 minimum) and most have plenty of health issues on top of that. They all have computers (I think they all run Windows of various iterations) and internet access.
It seems to me that it wouldn’t be extremely hard to create a program that could shuffle and deal hands for the players, show each player her own cards, and then show/report what card has been played as it goes. Cute animations and special effects, or even keeping score or whatever isn’t required, but might be fun.
Does anyone know of any website or downloadable program that can do this?
Note: this is a social thing for them, a group of long time friends getting together and chatting. So a site that matches up random assortments of people won’t do, they want to be with each other. And I guess some sort of chat feature is needed, too.
If they are ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) members, they should check out OneWorldBridge.com to see if there’s an online version of a club near them. You can play online with your usual partner/team.
OKBridge.com allows you to play online with your own foursome, as well as against other players.
If they really want to create an online version of their own club, they should contact ACBL for advice. I know one ACBL director who has spent much of the covid crisis so far helping bridge clubs shift online.
This is what I came to recommend. My parents and I like to play a rummy variation whenever I’m down visiting them, and we’ve been using playingcards.io to play together while isolated. You can also customize the decks. The game we play requires 2 decks with 4 jokers, and it was pretty simple to make that happen.
They used to have an online version of Cards Against Humanity as well. (Original base set.) They called it “Remote Insensitivity” due to not wanting to deal with trademark issues, but the cards were all from CAH.
They took it down. Not sure why since in theory they weren’t violating anything under the Creative Commons License that CAH is published under, but maybe they were. Or maybe they were getting swamped by players and their servers were suffering as a result. Or maybe they just decided to quit supporting it for some other reason.
Steam has Tabletop Simulator, which my daughter and her friends use for running card games on. It’s very freeform - the interface has commands for getting a pack of cards and manipulating them - as in, putting 'em on the table, flipping 'em over, etc - but you’re completely in charge of running your game any way you like, just as if it was a real card game on a real table.
May have a bit of a learning curve if you don’t normally play Steam games.
My bridge club has moved all its games to Bridgebase. I can still play with my regular partner, set up our convention cards, earn masterpoints, converse with other members of our club, everything. All we miss is the snack table!
I can’t comment personally, but my wife and her friends play on TricksterCards and swear by it. They use Facetime on their iPads to see and talk to each other:
Thank you all for the suggestions! I’m passing them along to my cousin, who’ll probably be the one that any hassles about configuration and such will land on.