About CardGames.pro

Site Background

What We Offer

We offer over 3,000 different free and fun online games which can quickly be played from the browser.

The thinking behind this site was since so many people were stuck at home during rolling lockdowns maybe we could add a bit of joy to people’s lives.

When we were on our first of many rounds of lockdowns one of the best bonding experiences my wife and I had was playing the game Putty Pals together – where my wife joked about “social distancing” after I accidentally grabbed and dropped her character in the lava one (hundred) too many times.

Both of the site founders loved playing games on consoles back in the days of the original Nintendo & this site aims to pay homage to that era. My wife was the oldest sibling in her family & she would hand her youngest brother a disconnected controller so he could play along. I was the youngest sibling and my siblings hogged the controller until they got to a boss battle they could not win & then they would give me the controller.

Today the gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and much of the gaming industry revolves around hyper-optimizing design for accidental ad clicks, paid upgrades, and creating addictive loops – all of which are needed to offset the cost of paying for distribution buying ads in other games and on other platforms.

In recent years many gaming companies have went public with valuations in the 10s of billions of dollars including Roblox, Unity and Applovin.

This site aims to beckon back to simpler times. We offer…

• no status symbols or paid upgrades
• simple games which are fun, but do not aim to alter your identity or establish addictive loops
• casual games you can dip in and out of, many of which you can beat quickly
• no need to download apps to play
• no need to register or set up a user account (though you can save your favorite games in the my favorites section if you want to save you favorites across multiple different computers)

A Constantly Expanding Collection of Games

Since launching in 2020 we have published thousands of games on our site. We try to publish at least a couple additional games every day, so if you click on the “New” menu link above pointing at cardgames.pro/games/ you should see something new almost every day. 🙂

If you do not see new games it means I am horribly sick, have died, or my internet connection was severed.

Technology

This website is powered using the fantastic WordPress blogging software and a couple plug-ins to help organize site structure and add features like game ratings. I once attended a conference with the founder of WordPress and got to eat lunch with him. It is amazing seeing how well they’ve grown over the past decade.

Most of our games are built as lightweight JavaScript web applications. They can take a bit of time to load initially (especially over wifi or a 3G cellular connection) but after you have played a game it should stay cached in your web browser for a period of time making subsequent plays much faster. If you know there is a game you will want to play on your phone in transit and are trying to be frugal with your data then load the game at home before heading out on your commute.

The blog theme was coded from scratch by the site founder using a design our web designer created. You can tell from the level of detail in the header graphic our lead frontend designer loves gaming every bit as much as the site’s founder.

Founding

Domain Name

The founder has a friend who is a well known internet marketer. Originally the site was going to have a different name, but the friend advised him the name “plays” was much better. The domain was acquired from Buy Domains on January 15th, 2021 and we got to work building the site immediately.

Founders

The founders of this website could be described as an extrovert mom who loves MMORPs and an introvert dad who loves beating a difficult logic puzzle game. We have worked on frontend and backend web development for a couple decades. Both parents have been mentioned in the mainstream media a number of times, but are more fond of being childlike and playing with their daughter than being adults.

On staff we have a few employees who work as front end designer, back end programmer, and copywriter. Everyone on our team loves video games.

Founding Ethos / Back to Basics / Play for Fun, Not Competition

This site was founded by a person who purchased multiple large storage racks to hold their massive video game cartridge collection. Their joy toward vintage video games stemmed from:

• the world was much slower and simpler in childhood
• most vintage console games had a concrete end to them and were self-contained units
• the fact the game was on a cartridge disconnected from the web and world meant it was its own little world
• no in-game paid upgrades
• the game was the product
• no infinite level of competition from other intense players (letting me be the Al Bundy who scored 4 touchdowns in a single high school game vs having me curse at the TV from people who are more intense and more talented than I am at Mariokart) 😀
• no glitching or cheese builds (or if you glitch, it is only against the computer) … here is looking at you
  • Double Dribble baseline fade away 3 over the backboard ALL DAY LONG
  • Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson 200+ yard run
  • RBI Baseball with runners on first and second stealing second base, ball in the outfield, run scored, man on third, bunt the bases loaded or at least runners on second and third then hit with AL all star team

This site is inspired by the above worldview. Many small snackable games. Little bits of joy. No paid upgrades or playing with the default character settings that social signals you can’t afford the upgrades. Not competing against others, but playing for the sake of play and to have fun. 🙂

This site aims to be a throwback which celebrates the web from the day before pop up ads & in-game ads that destroy the flow of playing without the need to be able to figure out how to use advanced emulation software like MAME to revisit the past & to preserve the joy some Flash gaming websites offered before Flash died.

I also get a sense of accomplishment whenever I beat a game & have beat about half the games on this site. I love games like Tales of Symphonia  & if time were limitless I would love to beat the entire series, though I struggle with time now after having a child and running a company with employees.

Funding

If we had to sum up our philosophy, we’d aim to be the antithesis of Marc Pincus.

Other than the domain name this website did not cost a lot to build as many of the costs are concurrent with other projects. The main cost is of course licensing the games. The site itself is pretty low key in terms of customizations beyond making a WordPress theme and a few WordPress plugins. Our designer created the design for this site in between other projects, this site is hosted on a shared web server (we just updated to a snappy new lightning fast server).

This website is funded through savings from operating other sites. Members of our team have worked for a variety of web companies including a company named after a long river and a big web portal before Google made web portals obsolete. The founders of this site are by no means rich, but have self funded.

This site was created as a way to use what we know to create something fun and to make some aspects of the work day a bit less boring than it otherwise would be, while believing we are making the web just a tiny bit better – especially for those who can not afford video games and are often stuck playing mobile apps optimized to frustrating users into buying upgrades or accidentally clicking ads. After Flash died last year it felt like something should come next to help replace all the fun Flash games which were online & we are trying to be a part of that.

We initially offered a few free games for the founder’s daughter. One time she threw the iPad after playing as the screen moved while she was trying to play the game. There’s nothing like seeing your daughter throw her iPad across the room to get you some real world user data and make you figure out how to solve such problems. From there what started as a little thing just kept growing into an obsession.

Video Games Are Great for Society

One of our most popular games is a math game named Guardians Defenders of Mathematica. Educational games can make learning fun while keeping kids focused on subjects they might otherwise find difficult or boring.

I believe video games have had a large positive impact on my life & have had a large net benefit on society. Initially there were lots of scare articles published about video games, though more recently neuroscientists have been conducting research showing how games increase neuroplasticity.

Cognitive flexibility is the key to learning and creativity (and plays a big part in a happy & successful life):

User Tracking & Privacy

This site does not carry any advertisements. Some games have social sharing buttons. If you click through to the social networks they do, of course, track everything you do on their site for personalization of their news feeds and ad targeting.

The only tracking service on our site where we look at it is Clicky, a web analytics tool. We use data from it to see which games are popular and track our site health overall. If we see a certain specific game or category of games is widely popular with our users then we will create more related games in that genre.

Media

As Seen In

While our site is young, we’ve been featured on many other websites including:

Anyone is free to link to this site without requesting. Links are what hold the web together. 🙂

Blog & Video Reviews

I appreciate all the gamers who have reviewed this site on their blogs and on video sites like YouTube. It is your sharing that helps this site grow. 🙂

I have lost count of how many reviews of our site gamers have done. Each one helps so much, so thanks to everyone who has played our site, shared our site, or reviewed our site. Here are a few more, though going forward I will probably stop adding videos to this page directly or will rotate some in where the above ones are and place some of the above ones in a list below so the load time is still quick.

• youtube.com/watch?v=YVG-O24MuqQ
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• youtube.com/watch?v=HNS87wCRjNU
• youtube.com/watch?v=mvj62fDmoyM

If you reviewed our site & would like featured here please leave a comment below. Thank you!

Terms of Service

This site is available free of charge for personal use.

You may play any games on this site in a web browser, but you agree not to access the site in unauthorized fashion including automated scraping.

Usage which appears to be outside of the realm of normal will be blocked.

All registered trademarks of characters in our games are owned by the original trademark holders.

CardGames.pro Logos

We offer a variety of logos you can use if you write about our website.

If you have a cool logo design idea you’d like to share in the comments be our guest.

Original

Black

White

Retro Colors

Overworld

Subtle Pink

Camo Colors

In Rainbows

If you have a media request you can contact us using either of the methods shown below.

Privacy Policy

Whenever you visit a website your web browser shows the IP address of the visitor. Beyond the IP address we typically do not collect any end user information unless you comment on our site.

The sections below descript our role with end user data & how to contact us with questions.

If we change anything significantly this page will be updated the same day.

How We Use User Data

• Our website is powered by a self-hosted install of WordPress. WordPress has a service called Akismet which uses the IP address and content of comments to help web publishers prevent their blogs from becoming overwhelmed by spam comments from bots like: “great site, this post was just what I was looking for. your informations are flowing the needful” authored by buy *pharma* online
  • If you comment on our site you can use any nom de plum you like and are not required to leave your name.
• We use IP addresses to block scraper sites and other forms of abuses to maintain server reliability for our end users.
• Our site uses Clicky web analytics.
  • Their privacy policy is here clicky.com/terms/privacy
  • We only look at the aggregate analytics data to determine which types of games and which individual titles on our site are popular so we can further improve those pages and publish additional games which are similar to the ones our users already like.
• We do not have any relationships with third party ad networks which would lay tracking cookies on our site.
• Your gameplay data
  • Most of our games are lightweight JavaScript applications.
    • When you play a game if it has unlockable levels and tracks high scores that sort of data is typically stored in your web browser rather than on our web server.
    • This enables players to continue their games even if they lose Internet access.
  • Some games on our site may also reference popular fonts or JavaScript packages hosted by companies like Google or Cloudfront.
  • A few select games may rely on third party integrations for centralized score keeping, though most of our games are entirely self hosted outside of stray font or JavaScript package references.
  • Some of our games have social sharing buttons you can click on to share your scores or follow us on networks like Twitter or Facebook. If you use those social networks and want to know what they do with your data then you’d need to read their privacy policies.
    • Facebook facebook.com/about/privacy/
    • Twitter twitter.com/en/privacy
    • Pinterest policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy
• Some pages on our site have related video content from YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google parent Alphabet. Their privacy policy is here: policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en-US

Contact Us

You can email us using the address Christine@plays.

Please note our domain name which handles emails is plays.email (not .com or .org or such … .email). If you send an email to any address on CardGames.pro it will not deliver.

The CardGames.pro web server has been heavily customized by our developer to ensure fast load speeds for the games even if we have hundreds or thousands of concurrent players. We took other unnecessary loads off the server, having our email handled by a different domain on another web server.

Alternatively, you can also post comments to this page. Every game page has a contact / feedback form on it. If you uncover any bugs or issues please let us know so we can fix them and improve the site for everybody. 🙂

Even our homepage has a comments form on it. The only pages which do not have comments forms are our category pages and archive pages. Those do not have comments due to the architecture of WordPress.

CardGames.pro published this on March 25, 2021