About Card Game Nook

Card Game Nook is a small collection of classic games that run in a browser tab: eight solitaires, mahjong, minesweeper, sudoku and hearts. There is no download, no account, and nothing between you and the board.

Why it was built this way

Most free game sites treat the game as bait. You arrive, and before a card moves you get an interstitial, a cookie wall, a newsletter modal and a leaderboard advertisement. The game is somewhere down there. Everything here is arranged around the opposite rule: the board is the first thing on the page and nothing may be placed above it. Advertising, when it is switched on, sits below the board and beside the written material — never over the game.

The rules are the real rules. Spider will not deal while a column is empty. FreeCell enforces the real sequence-move limit including the empty-column exception. Golf does not wrap at the Ace unless you ask it to. Where a game has a conventional score, that score is the conventional one, and the page says how it is calculated.

How the games are built

The eight solitaires share one engine. A variant supplies a deal, a legality test, a click-destination resolver and a win condition; the engine supplies undo and redo, hints, auto-finish, timing, statistics, drag-and-drop, keyboard control and the renderer. That is why the obscure variants — Yukon, Forty Thieves, golf — are as finished as Klondike rather than being afterthoughts.

Every deal is a pure function of a number, so deal #48213 is the same shuffle for everyone, forever. Mahjong layouts are generated backwards from a cleared board, which guarantees a winning line exists. Sudoku puzzles are dug out of a complete grid one symmetrical pair of cells at a time, with a uniqueness check after every removal.

What is stored

Your statistics and your unfinished game live in this browser’s local storage on this device. They are never uploaded, never linked to an identity and never sold, because there is nowhere to upload them to — the games have no server component at all. See the privacy page for the full picture, including what advertising would add if it is enabled.

Corrections and requests

If a rule is implemented wrongly, that is a bug and worth reporting — rules disputes are the most interesting mail this kind of site gets. Requests for a variant that is not here yet are welcome too; the engine makes most of them cheap. Contact details are on the domain’s WHOIS record while a contact form is being built.

Meanwhile: the games, the rules pages, and the embed snippets.