Card games are among the oldest forms of entertainment. The earliest playing cards date back more than 1,000 years to Ancient China, while the European cards comprising hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs, with which we are all familiar, have been around since the 1500s. An interesting facet of card games is their tendency to evolve over time. For example, the popular casino game of blackjack is based on the French game vingt et un, while poker is thought to derive from As Nas, which dates back to 16th century Persia.

The technological age has had a major impact on our leisure activities. Plenty of the games and pastimes that were popular with previous generations have fallen out of fashion, but that hasn’t happened with card games. In fact, technology has transformed the card games we play and the way we play them, making playing cards more popular and relevant to our leisure time in the 2020s than they have ever been before.

Early days and the freecell craze

In the 1990s, a key part of Microsoft’s strategy was to encourage people to use Windows for non-business purposes. This was the thinking behind the Entertainment Packs that were included from Windows 95 onwards. Several games were included in the pack, but the one that captured everyone’s attention was Freecell.

Microsoft took an obscure version of solitaire, one that would probably have disappeared into the pages of history by now, and triggered one of the biggest gaming crazes of the 1990s. The compelling thing about freecell is that almost every deal is solvable. It is that word almost that players find so tantalizing, and online communities sprung up devoted to the game and to tracking down those elusive unsolvable deals.

This served to strengthen Microsoft’s stranglehold on the game, as the numbered deals generated by its random number generator became the definitive method of identification.

Online poker, black Friday and a new poker dawn

Poker is the most popular card game in the world. For the past 50 years, technology has dramatically influenced the way the game is played. Back in the 1970s, video poker made the game accessible to novice players. A simple version of five card draw, it provided a perfect introduction to the game for players to familiarize themselves with the different hands and how they rank. Best of all, a game that is just against the machine was and remains far more approachable than taking on other players.

Video poker provided the first step towards more advanced versions of the game, such as Texas Holdem. Still, not everyone lives near a poker club where they can pop in for a game after work. Again, technology provided a solution, and almost as soon as the internet was up and running, online poker sites started to appear.

The online poker boom was so huge that a bust of some sort was inevitable. Growth had been faster than was healthy, and while the majority of providers and players just wanted to play poker, a growing number of shady and unethical operators started to appear. The US authorities acted decisively and without compromise on April 15 2011, essentially shutting down online poker on what became known as poker’s Black Friday.

12 years on, we can look back and say that was exactly what was needed. Today’s online poker in the US is conducted by reliable licensed operators and the best sites to play online poker provide a safe online environment that protects poker players in terms of their money and their personal data. Today, 60 million Americans play online poker, and they range from absolute beginners playing for fun to pros who play for six or seven figure pots.

Adding a competitive angle

Games are far more fun when there is some sort of competitive aspect. That’s why video poker players tend to move to multi-player versions of the game. It is also why the freecell craze got bigger and bigger in the 1990s and players shared specific hands and challenged one another to solve them. Technology has made it possible to extend this concept to other forms of solitaire.

It has led to a new craze where players compete for virtual tokens by taking on other players. The software presents all players with the same hand, so it eliminates the chance factor. Players have a limited time to solve the deal, and bonus points are awarded for time remaining after it is solved.

New card games from the virtual world

Technology hasn’t just worked magic on existing games. It has also spawned completely new ones that were born in the digital world. Here are just a couple of examples.

• The Pokemon Trading Card Game is a strategy-based card game where players use the cards they are dealt to do battle with one another. It is, of course, based on the Pokemon games developed for the Game Boy in 1996.
• Gwent is a turn-based card game that started out as a kind of mini game within The Witcher, an action RPG released in 2015. The game achieved moderate to high success, but many players spent more time playing Gwent than pursuing the main game. It proved so popular that it was released as a game in its own right in 2018.