What's New

Four standing rooms instead of eight.

Two of the eight had not hosted a single hand in two months while every room sat empty, which makes a site look dead and splits the few people here across doors they have to guess between. Everything those rooms offered is still here through Custom table, which does more than they did.

The called ace says why it will not play.

It is held back for the called suit, and a card that refuses to move with no explanation reads as a broken game. The table now tells you.

Reported by a player

Attach a screenshot to a bug report.

Paste it straight into the report. It is emailed to us with the report and stored nowhere.

Your hands follow you for seven days.

Signed in, you can look up a hand you played from any device for a week and check the deal against the commitment published before the cards came out. After seven days the link between you and that hand is dropped and the hand goes back to being an anonymous record. As a guest, nothing is ever linked to you.

See the trick just taken, and every trick before it.

The felt drops the previous trick the moment the next card lands. It now stays in the panel beside the table, with the earlier tricks one click away, and each card numbered with the order it was played.

A moment of lost connection between hands could empty your table.

Your seat was held if you dropped mid-hand, but not in the gap after one finished, which is exactly when people switch tabs. A two-second blip was enough to take the Sheet, the totals and the bots with it while you were still sitting there. Your seat is now held either way.

A site update could interrupt a hand and leave a board that would not respond.

An update went out while a hand was in progress. The player saw their cards and their turn, but the server no longer had that table, so nothing they clicked did anything and no error said why. Updates now wait for every table to finish and refuse to go out while anyone is mid-hand. The check that was supposed to prevent this could only see the public tables in the lobby, and this hand was in a private room, so it reported the site empty.

Reported by a player

One link that carries your rules.

Set a table up the way your group plays, copy the rules link, and whoever opens it gets those rules already filled in.

Clubs: your group's rules, its own standings, and a badge you earn.

Start a club, send one link, and your table is somewhere you come back to rather than something you rebuild every week. Standings run alongside the site board rather than replacing it. Once a club can field a full table of five, its badge appears beside its members' names.

Build the table your group plays: three to nine players, either partner rule.

Custom table replaces picking a room off a list. Three-handed and four-handed call an ace now deal properly, and what happens when everyone passes is a setting you change between hands instead of a separate room you had to go and find.

A partner can answer a crack, but still cannot make one.

Cracking is the defence betting against the picking side, so it was never the partner's to make. Answering one is: if the picker declines the recrack, a partner who never had the chance to pick now gets the call.

Card under: call an ace in a suit you hold nothing of.

When you hold the ace of every fail suit you have cards in, there was no legal partner to call and you had to go alone. Now you can call that ace anyway and lay one card face down. That card is the one you must play when the suit is led, which is what lets the rest of the table trust a call made into a void. A table option, off unless you turn it on.

The site moved to sheepsheadclub.com, and you will need to sign in again.

Said out loud, the old name sent people to a different card game: Smear is its own game with its own site, so anyone who heard "play schmear" and typed the obvious thing arrived somewhere else entirely. The new name contains the game. Every old link still works and lands on the same page it always did. Signing in again is unavoidable rather than a fault: your login is stored by your browser against the site's address, so a new address starts empty. If you were signed in, the hands you played came with you.

You cannot lay down on your last card.

Claiming the rest of the tricks when you hold one card is not a claim, it is just the end of the hand.

The game fits a phone properly.

Compact table rows, only the badges that matter to the hand on the felt, no sideways scrolling on narrow screens, and a nav that matches the rest of the site.

A trump cheat sheet at the table, and a printable one for the kitchen.

Trump order and card points without leaving your hand, plus a print kit with a score pad for playing in person.

Players in the United States were being counted as Australian.

Only players whose connection used the newer style of internet address. The lookup we used answered confidently and wrongly for every one of them, so the "where people are playing" figures were quietly wrong rather than missing. Those addresses are now left unplaced instead of guessed.

An old browser now says so instead of showing a blank page.

The site needs a browser from the last few years. Before this, an older one loaded nothing at all and gave no reason, which looks exactly like the site being down.

Event prizes need a minimum field, and the panel says so before you enter.

An event with three qualified players is not a tournament, and paying out as though it were is not honest. The rule is stated up front rather than discovered afterwards, and an unmet prize is not rolled forward into the next event.

The all-pass doubler stops at 16 times and then starts over.

Passed-out hands used to keep doubling the stake with nothing to stop them. A long run of pass-outs could reach numbers nobody wants to settle. It now caps at 16 and rolls back to double rather than sitting at the cap.

The totals row on The Sheet no longer has text showing through it.

Your own column is tinted, and the tint was see-through. With the sheet scrolled, the row passing underneath showed through the total, so two numbers sat on top of each other in exactly the cell you look at most.

The event lock could switch the bots to Hard in the middle of a hand.

Found on the first night of the July 4 festival. When a rush window opened, standing tables locked to Hard bots immediately, including tables with a hand already in progress: the seats you sat down against changed while you were playing them. The switch now waits for the hand to end.

Discord and Facebook links in the footer.

A three-night July 4 festival with a cumulative champion.

Nightly prizes across three nights, plus a separate race decided on total score across all of them, so one bad night does not end your week.

Ranked means the standard game: five seats, or six with the dealer sitting out.

Three and four-handed are real sheepshead and stay playable, but they are different games with different odds, and pooling them into one leaderboard compared scores that were never comparable.

The partner may lead the called ace.

Standard rule, and we had it wrong. Holding the called ace does not stop you leading it.

The bottom player's name collided with their own seat chip.

Text printed over text at the seat nearest you.

One table is always warm, so the lobby is never empty.

Arriving to a room with nobody in it is how a card site dies. There is now always somewhere to sit down immediately.

You can always call sheepshead, and the defence gets a celebration too.

Play now was seating people at three-handed tables.

The quick-play button is meant to put you in the standard five-handed game. It was sending some arrivals to a three-handed table instead, which is a noticeably different game to be dropped into unannounced.

Three and four-handed tables, including three-handed cutthroat.

Six-handed tables, with the dealer sitting the hand out.

Your recent hands are kept so you can go back and check them.

Verify any deal yourself, in your own browser.

Every deal publishes a fingerprint before the cards come out, and the seed afterwards. Verify deal checks one against the other on your machine, without asking us. If the deck had been stacked or reshuffled, the check would fail.

Called ten: when the picker holds all three fail aces, they call a ten instead.

The three-aces rule. Without it a picker holding every ace has nobody to call and the hand has no partner in it.

Event ties break the same way every time, and the rules are printed.

A prize decided by a rule nobody published is not a prize anyone should trust. The tiebreaker is fixed in advance and the conduct terms are written down.

Deploys wait for hands to finish instead of interrupting them.

Updates used to be able to land in the middle of your hand. They now hold until the tables are between hands.

A full year of events, published in advance.

Weekly nights plus holidays, so you can see what is coming rather than finding out on the night.

Hands today counted a day that ended in the wrong place.

The daily figures rolled over on a clock nobody at the table is on. They now use the Central calendar day, which is the day the events run on.

A proper logo, and a clean green lobby behind it.

The wood-plank pub backdrop went; the lobby is felt under a lamp.

Players who stop acting are removed after three timeouts.

One person walking away should not end the game for the other four.

Running out the doubling clock means "No thanks", never an automatic crack.

A timeout should never commit you to doubling the stake.

Bug reports were being silently thrown away.

The form accepted your report, thanked you, and sent nothing. Anything submitted before this date never reached us, which we would rather say plainly than quietly fix. Reports now also reach the operator by email.

A refresh puts you back in your seat, in your game.

Reloading the page used to mean losing the table.

Easy and Hard bots, with Easy the default for a new player.

One bot strength suits nobody. Easy is a table you can learn at; Hard is a table that punishes a loose pick.

A seat could be claimed by whoever reconnected next.

A resuming connection was handed a seat it had no claim to, so you could return to find yourself in somebody else's chair.

The supporter tiers linked to the wrong checkouts.

VIP and DIVINE were swapped, so picking one paid for the other.

Defending bots play as a team instead of five separate hands.

Bots were playing as though they knew who the partner was.

They could see the secret partner before it was revealed in play, which is not a difficulty setting, it is a different game. They now learn the partner exactly when you do: when the J-diamond or the called ace appears.

The four-colour deck, on by default.

Green clubs and blue diamonds. In sheepshead the diamonds are trump, and telling them from hearts at a glance matters more here than in most games. The toggle at the bottom right turns it off.

Rules, Learn, Strategy, Glossary and Variants pages.

Ranked counts public tables only.

A leaderboard you can farm at a private table against bots is not a leaderboard. Those hands still count, on a separate practice board.

Bots with distinct personalities rather than one house style.

Reserve a seat at a full table and sit down when the hand ends.

Double on the bump, as a table option.

Sit-out tables: five to nine at one table, with seats rotating out each hand.

Nine people at one table beats splitting into two half-empty rooms.

Real card faces, felt with depth, and cards that move when they are dealt and taken.

A turn clock, and a grace period to get back to your seat after a drop.

Play several tables at once in one window.

Named rooms and a link you can send to friends.

Accounts, leaderboards, badges and supporter tiers.

Supporter badges are cosmetic. Nothing you can buy changes a card.

Blitz, crack and recrack, with the doubler as the default pass-out rule.

Sheepshead Club opened: five-handed tables against bots, free, no chips and no ads.

Every deal was provably fair from the first hand: the deck is committed to before the cards come out, and you can check it afterwards.