About 28Arena
A game that has been played at kitchen tables for a century, given the ladder it deserves.
What this is
28 is a trick-taking partnership game from South India. Four players, two teams of two, thirty-two cards, and a hand that takes about six minutes. It is played on trains, in college canteens, and at family gatherings, usually with a deck somebody has had since school.
28Arena is that game online, with the things a competitive player expects: a rating that means something, opponents near your level, tournaments with published pairings, and a record of every hand you have played.
What it is not
There is no wagering here, no currency, no prize pool, and nothing to buy that affects a match. The rating is the reward. That is a deliberate product decision, not a stage we are passing through — a competitive card game and a gambling product are different things, and conflating them makes both worse.
How it is built
The rules of 28 live in one place: a pure engine with no I/O and no interface, shared by the server and the mobile client. The web client contains no rules at all — it renders what the server tells it, which is a stronger guarantee than two implementations agreeing.
Every match runs on an authoritative server that owns the deck. Your browser is sent one hand: yours. There is no code path that could send it another, because the shape of the data does not have room for one.
The deal is verifiable. Before any card is visible the server publishes a cryptographic commitment to the shuffle seed, and after the match it publishes the seed. You can reproduce the deal yourself and confirm it was fixed before the first card was seen.
One account, every device
Web, iPhone and Android are three clients of the same game. A player can start a match on a phone and finish it in a browser; a web player can join a table a phone created. Rating, friends, tournaments, clubs and history follow the account.
Who it is for
Students, families, friend groups, clubs and tournament players. If you learned 28 from a relative and have never played it against a stranger, this is for you. If you have played for thirty years and want to know where you actually stand, it is for you too.
New to the game? Learn it in two minutes. Something wrong? Get in touch.