The Game Parlor

The Game Parlor is a room full of games you can play entirely by voice or by typing — no board to look at, nothing to see. Every card is read out to you by name, and a real dealer keeps the game honest. You just say what you want to do.

New: characters in the seats (Hearts & poker night)

Hearts and Five-Card Draw joined the parlor, and they take real characters as players. Try: "deal up hearts with Sterling and Nana Pearl" or "poker night — seat Vinnie and Uncle Todd." Each character sees only their own hand, plays by the same rulebook you do, and talks at the table in their own voice. The dealer's code still referees every card — personalities bring the banter, never the shuffle.

The chip bank: casino games (Blackjack, poker) settle into your own persistent stack of fake chips — never real money. Ask any character "how are my chips?" or visit the Game Room for the family standings and your open tables.

The Parlor — play from a menu instead

Prefer picking your own cards to talking them through? The Parlor lists every game on a menu — choose one, set the table (characters optional), and every legal move is a real button. A house narrator in Kade's or Miss A's voice calls the table (or turn it off and let your screen reader drive), table talk keeps the company, and every table's transcript downloads for memories and bragging rights. Same tables as chat and the phone line either way.

Reverie is on the menu (September 11, 2026)

The first tile in the Parlor is not a card game: Reverie, the city, opens from the Parlor now, and every family account can walk in. It is the same kademurdock.com/world page; Back brings you to Kade-AI and the Parlor is one link away. Everything about the city is on its own page, Reverie — the city.

The lobby (September 11, 2026)

Right under the games, the Parlor now shows Open tables right now: every table somebody in the family has dealt with a free seat for friends, with the host's name, the game, how many seats are open, and the code. Tap one and you are seated — nobody has to read you a code any more. The page is laid out games first, then the lobby, then your own open tables, then the code box, then the standings, so a screen reader reaches a game before anything else. When you deal a table with open seats there is a Keep it off the lobby switch; turn it on and your friends need the four-character code from you, the way it always worked. A table drops out of the lobby when it fills, when it ends, or after a day. The iPhone app gets the same layout in its next build.

The one thing that makes it fair

Here's the important part: the computer deals and referees, not the character. The cards are shuffled and held by the game itself, so nobody — not you, not the character — can peek, cheat, or "accidentally" forget who has what. The character at the table only ever sees their own hand, same as you. That means you can actually trust the game, and the character is free to just be good company while you play.

What you can play right now

• Blackjack — get as close to 21 as you can without going over, and beat the dealer. Say "hit" for another card or "stay" to hold. You play with pretend chips — never real money.
• Wild Eights — our version of crazy eights. Match the top card by number or suit, drop an Eight to change the suit and mess with everybody, and empty your hand first to win. Play against one to three computer opponents.
• Go Fish — ask for cards, collect sets of four, most sets wins. Easy, friendly, and great over the phone or by voice. Perfect for the kids too.
• Uno — the family classic. Match the top card by color or number, throw Skips, Reverses and Draw Twos to slow everybody else down, and save your Wilds for the right moment. The dealer calls out your hand and your choices; first to empty their hand wins.
• War — the simplest card game there is, and the loudest. You and the house each flip a card; higher card takes both. Tie? That means WAR: three cards face down, one face up, winner takes the whole pile. No decisions, all drama — a perfect first game for the littlest players.
• Pig — the press-your-luck dice game. Roll to pile up points, hold to bank them — but roll a one and the whole turn's points vanish. First to 100 wins. Made for the phone: two choices, all sound.
• Trivia Night — real quiz questions with four choices, A through D. Play solo, or race up to three characters who answer the same questions you do. Pick a topic (movies, music, science, history, animals and more) and a difficulty, or take a mix.
• In-Between — the old card-room classic. Two posts go up, you bet pretend chips on whether the next card lands between them. Smack a post dead-on and it costs double. Double your stack to win.

The party games (new!)

• Cards Against Reality — exactly what it sounds like: our house spin on the famous cards-against game, with over 500 original cards written for this family. A judge flips a prompt like "Grandma keeps ____ in her purse at all times," everybody plays their funniest card, and the judge crowns a winner. You play from your own hand AND take your turn as judge. The regular deck is for the grown folks' table; say "keep it clean" any time for the family deck.
• Crab Apples — our apples-to-apples. The judge flips a description card — "Squeaky," "Majestic," "Suspicious" — and everyone plays the thing that fits best (or funniest: sometimes "the DMV line" IS the most majestic answer). All ages, all clean.
• Fill-In Stories — you hand over a noun here and a verb there, then hear the whole ridiculous story read back with full drama. Eight original stories and the game holds the ending secret so nothing spoils.
• Guess the Sound — the table plays one of its own real sound effects, you name it from three choices. Ears only. Kids will run this one into the ground, which is the idea.

Dice, bluffing, and the rest

• Farkle — roll six dice, set aside what scores (ones, fives, triples, a straight, three pairs), and push your luck on the rest. A roll with nothing scoring is a FARKLE and torches the turn. First to 4,000.
• Liar's Dice — five dice under your cup, ones are wild. The table trades rising bids — "three fours," "four fours" — until somebody calls LIAR and the cups come up. Lose the call, lose a die. Bluffing by voice at its finest.
• Battleship — call your shots out loud: "B seven!" … splash, or BOOM. Rows run A to J, columns 1 to 10, and the house hunts you back honestly (it only knows the squares it has already shot). Sink all five of its ships first.
• Hangman — the game holds a secret word from a category (critters, good eatin', places around here…), you call letters, six misses and the gallows wins. The word gets spelled out clean for screen readers every turn.
• Word Scramble — hear the letters, unscramble the word. Hints cost half the point. Beat par across five words.
• Tic-Tac-Toe — squares one through nine like a phone pad. The house plays decent-but-beatable on purpose.
• Rock Paper Scissors — best of five against the house, for when you've got ninety seconds and something to prove.

Still queued: multi-character game nights (poker with a table full of personalities) and a persistent family chip bank.

How to start a game

Just ask. Tell Kiana — or Deuce the house dealer, or any character with the games tool — something like "let's play Blackjack," "deal us into Cards Against Reality," or "let's play Battleship." The dealer takes it from there: it deals you in, tells you your hand, and lays out your choices in plain words. You say what you want to do, and it plays it out.

Playing by ear

Everything is spoken. Instead of a pile of cards on a screen, you'll hear things like "You've got the Ace of Spades and the King of Hearts — that's twenty-one, blackjack!" You never have to picture a table. Say your move in normal words ("hit me," "I'll ask for kings," "play my red eight and call diamonds") and the dealer sorts out the details.

Real table sounds

Games come with real sounds now — cards being shuffled and dealt, dice rattling across the table, chips clacking down, a little fanfare when you win and a sad trombone when you don't. You'll hear them in regular chat, in conversation mode, and on the phone. They play themselves at the right moments; there's nothing to set up.

Play on the phone

Call the usual number — +1 833 530 0313 — and just say "deal me in" or "let's pick up my game." If you have an account, the same saved table from your chats is waiting for you on the call, sounds and all. Pig and Trivia are especially good by phone: for trivia, just blurt your answer the second you know it — interrupting is allowed. That IS the buzzer.

Your games wait for you

A game you start is saved to your account. Walk away in the middle of a hand and it'll still be there tomorrow — in a new chat, or even on a phone call. Just say "let's pick up my game" and you're back at the table.

See the table — visuals for sighted players

Games now draw themselves on screen. When a character deals a hand in the chat, a picture of the table appears right under their message: your cards face-up, everyone else's face-down, the discard pile, dice, chip counts, trivia questions with their answer choices — updated after every move, with little card-deal animations and confetti when you win. The same table shows up in conversation mode while you play by voice.

Two honest notes. First, the picture never shows anything the character hasn't already told you — it's the same game, just drawn. Screen reader users lose nothing and gain no clutter: the visual is completely invisible to VoiceOver and NVDA on purpose, so the spoken experience is exactly what it always was. Second, if you prefer less motion, the animations respect your device's reduce-motion setting automatically.

The Game Room — family bragging rights

Every game you finish lands on the family leaderboard. Open the Game Room from the account menu (bottom-left, under Explore), or go straight to kademurdock.com/game-room. It shows who's winning across the whole family: total wins and losses for each player, a champion for every game, the biggest Blackjack win ever, the best Trivia Night score, and the latest results as they happen.

Only finished games count. Walking away from a table in the middle never counts as a loss — the board only knows about games played to the end. And like everything here, it reads top to bottom with a screen reader: plain tables, plain words, no charts to squint at.

The small print (tiny, promise)

The games themselves are free — no tokens, no cost. Chips in Blackjack are pretend and can never turn into real money. If a character sings you a song or draws a picture during game night, that part follows the usual costs on your Usage & Balance tab, but the card games are on the house.