If somebody teaches you a card game at a kitchen table, there is a decent chance the rules exist on Pagat in a version assembled from people who actually play it.
John McLeod founded the site in 1995 with a simple goal: document traditional card and domino games so players could discover unfamiliar games and preserve the rules of ones they already knew.
Three decades later, the structure has become enormous without becoming mysterious.
You can browse alphabetically, by number of players, by region, by mechanism, by objective, or by equipment. There are sections for solitaire, dominoes, proprietary games, invented games, children’s games, poker variants, and traditional games that rarely make it into mass-market rule books.
Folk knowledge with an index
Card-game rules are slippery historical material.
Families change them. Regions use different names. A game moves across borders and picks up local variations. Sometimes two groups use the same name for noticeably different games.
Pagat’s value is not merely that it posts instructions. McLeod explicitly credits readers from around the world for sharing information about the games they play and helping expand the site.
That turns the website into something between a reference manual and a long-running collection of living folk rules.
The name “Pagat” comes from the lowest trump in the Central European game Tarock. That is exactly the sort of fact you wind up learning because somebody maintained a specialist website for thirty years.
The site was still actively updated in September 2026.
From a webmaster’s perspective, Pagat is also a good example of why deep classification matters. A giant subject does not have to become unusable if readers can approach it from several sensible directions. “I have four people and a normal deck of cards” is a perfectly valid navigation problem, and the site has an index for that.
This is one of the sites gathered in CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research list for people who want the source corpus rather than individual guided stops.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
If you vaguely remember a card game from childhood, learned something strange while traveling, or simply need something better to do with a deck than another round of poker, Pagat is still doing its job.