The flagship title
Regent’s Hand
Twenty-one as the court plays it: one deck, one dealer, one number to approach without overstepping. Stakes are paid in virtual coins that cannot be bought and cannot be cashed.
JavaScript is required to deal a hand.
Reckoning the hand
- Numbered cards
- Two through ten are worth the number printed on them.
- Court cards
- Jack, queen and king are each worth ten.
- Aces
- An ace counts eleven whenever eleven keeps you at twenty-one or below; otherwise it drops to one. The table applies this for you, card by card, as the hand grows.
- Overreaching
- A hand above twenty-one is lost at once, whatever the house holds.
The house’s fixed rule
- The draw
- The dealer draws while its hand totals less than seventeen and stands on seventeen or more. It never chooses; it never looks at your cards first.
- Settling
- The higher hand of twenty-one or under wins. Equal totals are a standoff and your stake is returned in full.
- Twenty-one on the deal
- Two cards totalling twenty-one pays three to two. If both you and the house hold one, the round is a standoff.
- Your purse
- One thousand virtual coins to begin. Stakes are deducted when the cards come out and winnings credited the moment the round is called. Reset the purse whenever you wish.
What this game is, plainly
Regent’s Hand is a social casino game. It borrows the shape of a card table found in gaming rooms the world over, and then removes the only part that carries risk: the money. Coins here are tokens in the arcade sense — free to receive, impossible to purchase, and worth nothing the instant you close the tab.
Nor do we keep a record of your play. The deck, the purse and the outcome of every round exist solely in the memory of your own browser. Reload, and the court resets as though you had never sat down. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight: a game with no ledger cannot tempt anyone to chase a number back up.
Success at this table says nothing about real-money gambling elsewhere, and should never be read as practice for it. If you would like more on that, our Responsible Play notes set out how we think about it.