Sometimes you can find people to play spades in your local area and sometimes you want the thrill of playing online spades. Having a local group is nice, but it is hard to get schedules straight and get everyone together at the same time to play. Even worse, just because you know someone who likes playing, does not mean they are near your level of Spades expertise. That’s when it is time to turn to online spades for a game that fits your schedule and competition that fits your experience level.
When you turn to online spades to get your game on, here are ten sites you can visit for a challenge game, a casual game, or even an online tournament.
In the realm of online Spades, MSN Spades may very well be the king. It’s absolutely free to anyone that has an MSN/Hotmail account (both free) and offers a huge, vibrant online Spades community just looking for a game. At any given time, thousands of players can be online in an MSN Spades room of different skill levels. Not only that, if you just want to play without having to find an open table, you can play against the computer as well.
MSN’s software is also some of the best for playing online Spades. It features a clean interface with beautifully rendered tables at which to play the game. The software also has a match finder which can get you into a game at your skill level at the click of a button. Perhaps even more impressively, the site features four variants: Short, Suicide, Mirror, and Whiz for many different varieties of game play.
If MSN is the king of online spades sites, Yahoo! is the prince. Yahoo! has been in the online card games business for years and the impressive size of their user base is proof of it. They have a large number of players, any number of which can be found playing online spades at any given time. To accommodate those players, Yahoo! has a large number of rooms, sorted by skill level, so finding an open Spades table is not difficult. That’s the good part.
The not so good part is that Yahoo! has been around for years and sometimes their software feels like it’s just ancient. It’s all Java-based and, well, quite frankly, it’s not nearly as easy to use or attractive to look at as MSN. While pretty user interfaces may not be a big deal to some online Spades players, the streamlined options in MSN’s client give it the slight edge in overall user experience.
Pogo is another online game site, much in the same vein as MSN and Yahoo! However, all Pogo does is games and they do it very well. Registration on the site is completely free, so all you have to do is sign up and start playing. There is no doubt about the fact that Pogo.com is a great place to play online card games and, in fact, their user interface is much nicer than Yahoo!’s. However, Pogo ranks third on this list of ten online spades sites because it is not as well known as Yahoo! or MSN and, as a consequence, can have a smaller number of people playing at any one time.
Spadestr.com is an interesting site amongst the online Spades community. The site offers downloads of its own spades client that is as nice as any online. (In fact, their client is so popular it is offered as a download for other online Spades sites.) Once you download the client, you can play for free against other players online. However, you can also fund your account and go against other players for real money.
MySpades is one of the sites that uses the Spadestr.com client to enable players to go online and play the game of Spades. However, the site, in many ways, seems to be a better place to start if you are just beginning your foray into online spades. For instance, they offer more spades practice rooms where you can sharpen your skills against the computer before going online and playing against real life human opponents. Then you can play against other humans in the self-proclaimed largest Spades community on the Internet in non-practice games. Then, once you think you are ready, like Spadestr.com, you can go head-to-head for money against other players.
Spades Online at ILoveSpades.com
Spades Online at ILoveSpades.com is perhaps not the most attractive site, but what it lacks in good looks, it makes up for in its simplicity and its dedication to allowing people to play spades. Their dedication includes going to Java clients which can be played through a browser and even an iPhone client so you can take your Spades anywhere. Also, like most other online spades sites, Spades Online is free, all you need to do is sign up.
Hardwood Spades is a special derivative of spades created by Silver Creek Entertainment. Hardwood Spades allows players to play the game of Spades using a downloadable client, but spices up standard Spades with many storytelling elements. In some ways, it is almost like a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) because it lets players create an online virtual avatar. This avatar is selected from various character images, backgrounds and colors to make it personalized to the player.
Once this avatar is selected, it is used to navigate through the world of Hardwood Spades, which is this magical place where avatars sit down to play the game of Spades, but also do really cool things like toss fireballs, shoot lightning bolts, or blow kisses. Things you couldn’t or shouldn’t do in real life.
If that weren’t enough, Hardwood Spades boasts a very impressive number of players. At any given moment, thousands of players are online playing Spades and other Hardwood games. Players can also participate in one of hundreds of different card tournaments each day. That should make it fairly easy to find a game online.
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