Masa de joc

Masa de joc brings five Romanian card games online — Macao, Șeptică, Tabinet, Trombon and Război — played, in the footer's own words, "the way they are played at home, with the rules from here". Nothing is installed: you open a table, choose the game, the number of seats, the pace and whether the game counts towards the leaderboard, then send out the table's address. Anyone who has it can watch from the side — exactly what you would see standing next to a real table: who is sitting there and the cards on the table, never anyone's hand — and with an account they can take an empty seat.

The host does not have to wait for a full table: the game can start straight away with bots in the empty seats, and whoever arrives later takes a bot's place without interrupting the game. The game itself lives on the server, not in the browser: a move that breaks the rules is refused by the server whatever the screen shows, and each player receives a version of the game with everyone else's cards left out — "your opponents' hands never reach your browser, not even hidden". At a table with a clock, a player who does not move in time is removed from that game, and the others carry on.

Every game keeps its own leaderboard, rated Elo-style, because a Tabinet master has no reason to rank high at Război, "where luck counts for more". Rating only moves between people: the moment the first bot sits down, the table leaves the leaderboard for good. As for the rules, these games are played differently from one region to the next, so the site applies a single variant of each, with its rules "written exactly as the server applies them". Every rules page lists the common regional variants and says which are played at these tables and which are not.