Every Game You Can Play With a Standard Deck

One deck, four suits, thirteen ranks — and an enormous range of completely different games sit on top of that same simple object. This isn't a history of where the deck came from (that's covered separately in where playing cards actually came from); it's a practical map of what you can actually deal from a single ordinary pack, organized by what kind of game each family actually plays like.

Trick-taking games, where following suit is the whole engine

Hearts, Spades, Euchre, Whist, Oh Hell, and Bridge (Basics) all revolve around the same core mechanic — players must follow the suit that was led if they're able to, and the highest card (or highest trump) wins the trick — but each layers something different on top of it. Hearts scores by avoiding certain cards, Spades and Euchre add a bidding phase, Bridge adds partnership bidding deep enough to support entire tournaments on its own. Every one of these plays with a full, unmodified 52-card deck, jokers set aside.

Rummy-family games, built around matching sets and runs

Rummy, Gin Rummy, Canasta, Pinochle, Hand and Foot, and Liverpool Rummy all share the same underlying goal — arrange your hand into valid sets and runs faster than everyone else — while differing sharply in scale. Gin Rummy is a tight two-player race decided in a single hand; Canasta and Hand and Foot use multiple full decks and stretch across several hands with much higher point totals. Pinochle is the outlier of the group in one specific way: traditional Pinochle uses its own stripped-down 48-card deck (two copies each of 9 through Ace, no cards below a 9), not a standard 52-card pack, even though it's built from the same suit-and-rank logic.

Fast, low-strategy games built for reflexes or simple matching

War, Crazy Eights, Egyptian Ratscrew, Go Fish, and President (Asshole) trade strategic depth for pace and accessibility — most of these are learnable from a single explanation and playable by a table with a wide range of ages and experience, which is exactly why they show up so often in the best card games for family game night.

Casino and gambling-style games, played for their own scoring logic

Blackjack, Five-Card Draw Poker, and Texas Hold'em (Basics) all use a standard deck without any modification, but they're built around betting and hand-ranking rather than melding or trick-taking, which makes them feel like a genuinely separate family even though the physical deck underneath is identical to everything else on this page.

Solitaire, for exactly one player and (sometimes) two decks

Klondike Solitaire is the single-deck, single-player default most people picture when they hear "solitaire." FreeCell Solitaire also runs on one standard deck but deals the entire pack face-up from the start, trading luck for almost pure logic. Spider Solitaire is the one genuine outlier on this whole list in the other direction — it's traditionally played with two full standard decks shuffled together (104 cards), not one, because a single deck doesn't provide enough cards to build its longer columns.

Two games that quietly use a different deck than you'd expect

Beyond Pinochle's 48-card deck, two more games on this site bend the "standard deck" assumption in their own way. Skat traditionally uses a 32-card deck — sevens through Aces only, with everything below a 7 removed entirely — reflecting the smaller card packs long common in German-speaking regions, distinct from the full 52-card pack English and French card games settled on. Five Hundred commonly strips or adds cards depending on player count, most often removing low cards to reach a 43-card deck for a standard four-player game. Neither of these is a variant invented by casual players — they're the actual traditional deck size for that specific game, which is worth knowing before assuming a standard 52-card pack will work straight out of the box.

What "standard deck" actually means, for the games above that depend on it

A standard deck is 52 cards across four suits — hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades — with thirteen ranks each, Ace through King, plus (usually) two jokers set aside unless a specific game calls for them. That's the whole spec, and it's worth being precise about it because a handful of games above genuinely deviate from it in ways that matter at the table: Pinochle's 48-card deck removes every rank below 9, Skat's 32-card deck removes everything below 7, and Five Hundred's common 43-card table variant strips low cards depending on how many players are seated. None of those are house-rule inventions — they're the actual traditional deck size published for that specific game, which is a different situation from a table choosing to add a wild-card rule on its own.

Two-player games that also happen to use a standard deck

A handful of the games above are worth calling out specifically for working well at exactly two players even though they're not built exclusively around that number: Gin Rummy is essentially designed for two, and Egyptian Ratscrew, War, and Klondike-style patience games all hold up fine one-on-one or entirely solo. For a list built specifically around the two-player case rather than scaled down from a bigger table, see the best two-player games for couples.

Dealing with jokers

Most games on this list are played with jokers removed entirely — Hearts, Spades, Euchre (which adds only the joker as a "best bower" in some variants, not as standard), Rummy, and the casino games above all set jokers aside by default. Games that do use them lean on the joker specifically as a wild card in melding — Canasta and Hand and Foot both use jokers as high-value wild cards, which is part of why those two games run with multiple full decks shuffled together rather than just one.

Do I need anything besides a standard deck for any game on this page? Spider Solitaire needs two decks, not one, and Pinochle and Skat need their own smaller traditional decks rather than a full 52-card pack — everything else here plays straight out of one ordinary deck.

Which of these is the fastest to teach someone who's never played a card game at all? War requires zero decision-making beyond comparing card values, which makes it close to instant to teach, though how to teach a new game in under five minutes covers a faster general method that works for most of the games on this list, not just the simplest ones.

Can I substitute a standard deck if I don't own a Skat or Pinochle-specific one? For Skat, yes — remove everything below a 7 from a standard 52-card pack and you have a legal 32-card Skat deck. For Pinochle, no substitution works cleanly, since the game needs two copies of each rank from 9 through Ace, which a single standard deck doesn't contain.