CLASSIC GAMES
Play classic board and card games online with friends
Chess, checkers, backgammon, Go, dominoes, poker and more — set up on a real 3D physics table in your browser, free, with nothing to download.
A real table, not a rules engine
DiceyTable gives you the physical game — the board, the pieces and real 3D physics — not a rules engine. Nobody's move is validated and no illegal move is blocked, so house rules and variants cost you nothing. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, it is free, and you share a link to bring people in.
Setup is manual: you place the board and pieces from the in-table object library, the same way you would unpack a box. Every player needs a free account — there is nothing to download on any device.
Pick a game
Every game below is public domain, and every piece it needs is in the built-in object library — each page lists exactly which pieces, and exactly what is still missing.
3 of them — Chess, Checkers, Go — already have a finished pack that sets the board up for you. The rest you lay out yourself from the object library, which takes a couple of minutes and is the same thing as opening a box.
Chess
Open a table, place the board, and play chess the way you would across a kitchen table — you move the pieces yourself, and you and your opponent call the rules between you.
Checkers
Also known as Draughts, English draughts
Checkers — draughts, if you grew up outside North America — is the classic everyone already knows the rules to, which makes it the easiest multiplayer board game to start a table with. Place the board, drop the pieces on, and go.
Backgammon
Backgammon is a dice game before it is a board game, and dice are the thing DiceyTable does best — these are real rigid bodies tumbling across the table, not a random number with an animation on top.
Go
Also known as Baduk, Weiqi
Go has the simplest rules of any game on this list and the deepest play. Stones here are real modelled pieces you pick up out of a bowl and set down, which is most of the pleasure of the game.
Chinese Checkers
Also known as Sternhalma
The best of the classics for a bigger group: two, three, four or six can play, the rules take thirty seconds to explain, and nobody is ever eliminated.
Reversi
Also known as Othello
Reversi is the one game on this list where the physical table genuinely improves it: the discs are two-sided pieces you pick up and flip, so the satisfying part of the game is the part you actually do.
Dominoes
This is the best-supported game on the list: every one of the twenty-eight tiles in a double-six set is a real 3D model with its pips on it, and they stack, clatter and fall over like the real thing.
Hearts
Hearts needs exactly two things a virtual table usually gets wrong: a proper shuffled deck, and a hand nobody else can see. DiceyTable has both — your hand is hidden from the other players at the protocol level, not just visually.
Spades
Spades is a partnership game, which makes it the best card game on this list for a group of four who actually want to talk to each other while they play.
Poker
Also known as Texas Hold'em, Five-card draw
A home game, not a casino. Real chips you stack and push into a pot, a real deck, and hole cards that are genuinely hidden from the other players — no money changes hands anywhere on DiceyTable.
Liar's Dice
Also known as Perudo, Dudo
A bluffing game that needs almost nothing: five dice each and somewhere to hide them. The dice are real rigid bodies, so the roll is a roll — you watch them tumble and settle.
Cribbage
Cribbage is the best two-player card game there is, and the deck and the hidden hands it needs are both here. Be aware of one honest limitation before you start: there is no pegboard model yet.
Bring your own game instead
The same table runs games other people have built and published, and the in-browser editor is free if you want to build one yourself.