Build note · 2 min read
Card Fever 1.4: twenty-seven games, thirteen languages
Card Fever 1.4 is live on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It is the biggest update since launch: 27 card games, and the whole app in 13 languages.
What is new:
- India’s table games. Twenty-Eight, Mendikot, Court Piece and Dehla Pakad join Callbreak, each with a Teach mode: a few intro pages, then a tip on every turn that explains the decision in front of you.
- Spider Solitaire, with one or two suits. Like Klondike and FreeCell, every deal is proven winnable before it ships.
- Wild Eights house rules. Make any card wild, skip, reverse or draw, stack penalties, call your last card, or pick a ready-made set.
- 13 languages: English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Spanish (Latin America and Spain), French, German, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). The table commentary is translated too, not just the buttons.
- Seven looks, from the original Funk to Club, Glass, Neon, Paper, Mela and Soft.
- Bots at three strengths, a Daily Deal that is the same for everyone, and deeper rules: card passing in Hearts, splits in Blackjack, roles in President, melds you lay down in Rummy.
- Leave any game and continue later, and undo a move against bots.
The part I am happiest with is invisible. Every table is now a seed plus the moves you made. That one decision gives you resume, undo and a shared Daily Deal for free, because the app can rebuild any game exactly. It also forced discipline: no hidden randomness, no bot that depends on the order of a dictionary, and a version bump whenever a deal could change.
Translating a card game is harder than translating an app. The buttons are easy. The table log is not: “Maya plays 7♣”, “Bid 17 by Arjun”, “tricks 2 to 3”. The engines still write English, and a phrase book of a few hundred templates turns each line into the player’s language on screen, so saves, replays and Wi-Fi play never depend on the language.
Still free, still no ads, no accounts and no betting. If your family plays Twenty-Eight or Court Piece, I would love to hear how the bots hold up.