About Naibi

What this is

A reference for how to play card games, for the deck you already own. Every game here is playable with cards you can buy anywhere — a standard 52-card pack, sometimes two, occasionally a named pack the entry tells you about up front.

It is built for the moment it is actually needed: someone at the table asks how a rule works, or you are teaching a game you have not played in a year. So it loads fast, works with no signal once you have opened it, and can be installed to a home screen like an app. There is no account, no tracking and nothing to sign up for.

The name

Naibi is the first European word for playing cards, recorded in Florence in 1377. Cards reached Europe from the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in the 1370s and the Italians called them naibi, from the Arabic nā'ib, "deputy" — the rank of court card in the Mamluk pack that every European deck descends from. Spain still calls them naipes.

How it is made

Every game is one structured file: the players, the deal, the rules, the scoring, the variants worth knowing. The website, the printable booklet and the plain-text version are all generated from those same files, so a rule corrected once is corrected everywhere.

The text is the project's own. Rules are facts and anyone may describe them, but the words a source chose to describe them in belong to that source — so entries here are written rather than reworded, and each one lists what it was checked against.

That is the rule the project holds itself to, not a guarantee it has finished auditing. Checking wording against a source is slow, it has caught real mistakes before, and it is not complete across the collection. If a passage reads close to something you have read elsewhere, please say so — that is a bug, and it gets fixed.

Using it elsewhere

The rules text is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0: use it, print it, build on it, including commercially, as long as you credit Naibi and share what you build on the same terms. The code that generates all this is MIT.

Corrections and contributions

80 games so far, and rules vary by region and family — if something here disagrees with how you learned it, that is worth knowing. Open an issue or send a change on GitHub.

Take it with you

The whole collection is also a printable booklet — one PDF, bookmarked, a game to a page. Or just open this site once and it stays available offline.

Install it

Naibi can sit on your home screen or dock and open in its own window, with no address bar and no signal needed. Every browser that can do this keeps it in a menu rather than on the page.