Speed — free online card game with no turns

Speed is the card game where nobody waits. Both players have a draw pile and a hand of five, and there are two piles in the middle. The moment a card in your hand is one rank above or below the card showing on a centre pile, you can put it there — and so can your opponent, on the same pile, at the same time. Aces join both kings and twos, so the ranks run in a circle. Refill your hand to five from your own pile and keep going. Whoever gets rid of every card first wins.

When neither side can move, both centre piles get a fresh card and it starts again. Your score is rounds won in a row, and the computer's reaction time gets shorter with every win — from a beatable third of a second down towards a tenth. It never cheats: it may only play a card that is legal at the moment it decides, and if you take the pile first it has to look again, exactly as a person across a table would.

How to play

• Tap a card in your hand, then tap the centre pile you want to put it on.
• A card fits if it is one rank above or below the pile's top card. Ace joins King and 2.
• Cards that fit somewhere are outlined in green, so you can see your options at a glance.
• Your hand refills to five from your draw pile automatically.
• If neither of you can play, the two side piles turn over a fresh card each and play restarts. Ten seconds with nothing played does the same, so a round cannot stall.
• First to run out of cards altogether wins the round. A loss ends your streak.

Why two taps, and how to be quick anyway

Every other card game here plays a card with one tap. Speed uses two — card, then pile — and that is a deliberate trade. In a real-time game a mis-tap is unrecoverable: there is no turn to take back, and a card slapped onto the wrong pile is a card you needed. The two-tap rule makes the choice explicit, and the computer's reaction delay is set against that cost, so the race stays fair rather than being decided by who has the twitchier thumb.

The way to be quick is not to tap faster, it is to look at the right thing. Watch your hand, not the piles: five cards is a small enough set to hold in your head, and the two pile tops change constantly. Once you know your hand, you are only ever checking whether either top card is next to something you hold. Players who scan the piles first are always half a beat behind.

The other habit worth building is chaining. A card you play becomes the new top, so ask what your next card would be before you play the first one. Holding a 6, 7 and 8 with a 5 showing is three plays in a row if you take them in order, and one play if you do not. That is where rounds are won — not in reaction time, but in seeing two moves ahead while your hands are busy. If you like the pace, Crazy Eights is the turn-based version of the same shedding idea, and Aim Trainer is the pure reaction test.

More games

More from 🃏 Card & solitaire games:

• Solitaire — Classic Klondike, built for one hand: tap a card and it moves itself. Undo, auto-finish, and your best time saved.
• FreeCell — Every card face up from the start, so there's no luck left to blame. Four free cells and a clock.
• Spider Solitaire — One suit, ten columns, eight runs to build. Make an empty column early or you'll wish you had.
• Mahjong Solitaire — Match free tiles two at a time and dig the stack apart. Every board is dealt solvable.
• TriPeaks Solitaire — The quick one. Run cards up and down the ranks in one long chain — eight in a row is worth four times eight singles.

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