Bcstevieb

Classic card games and fantasy card worlds on your Android phone? Yes, please!

For some, card games are the ultimate way to relax. Killing time on your morning commute or unwinding at the end of your day playing card games can happen on your phone now, which is fantastic. You can play solo or face opponents in virtual game rooms anytime, day or night, in casino-style games or fantasy card games of every kind.

We've collected the best of both worlds with our rundown of the best card games for Android.

• The Elders Scrolls: Legends — Heroes of Skyrim
• Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft
• CardShark
• Gin Rummy Plus
• BlackJack 21
• PokerStars Poker: Texas Holdem
• Euchre Free
• Magic: 2015
• Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
• Card Crawl
• Exploding Kittens
• Cribbage With Grandpas

The Elders Scrolls: Legends — Heroes of Skyrim

At first glance, The Elders Scrolls: Legends looks to be following the steps of Blizzard and its wildly popular card-battling game Hearthstone — and that's great news. Hearthstone blew up fast, continually extending the already expansive universe of Warcraft while building up a fanbase of millions of players.

Bethesda is clearly looking to go after that Hearthstone market with The Elders Scroll: Legends, and they've come out of the gate strong. Legends is a really polished game that recently launched on Android. Having got into playing Hearthstone way late into the game's lifecycle, I enjoyed playing it but always felt like I'd never catch up with the best players who had been playing for years. If you've felt the same way, too, now's the time to get in on Legends at the ground floor.

Rather than being a Hearthstone clone, Legends does introduce some new mechanics — most notably the inclusion of lanes. It's a seemingly small change that really adds a whole layer of added strategy to how you play your cards.

TES: Legends gives you a few ways to play. Firstly, there's the story mode that initially teaches you the ropes and lets you earn new Legend cards, decks, and packs; draft mode lets you build a deck and take on computer opponents. If you think you're ready, test your decks against your friends or challenge online opponents in ranked battles. See you in the Arena!

Download: The Elders Scrolls: Legends — Heroes of Skyrim (Free w/IAPs)

Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft

Hearthstone is a card-based strategy game set in a fantasy world. Play cards to cast a spell and summon your minions as you fight to win battles. Rather than go through a tutorial, you're thrown right into introductory missions that teach you the ropes as you play. Additionally, before playing against other live players in the battle arena, you can engage in practice matches against computer-controlled heroes.

Your cards and points can be transferred from your phone to your tablet or computer, since your cards and awards are linked to your Battle.net account and will travel with you. The in-app purchases unlock new battles and give you access to rare, coveted cards.

Download Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft (Free with in-app purchases)

CardShark

Play Classic Solitaire and a number of its variations in this multi-game app. Additional games include Limit Texas Hold 'Em, Spades, Egyptian Ratscrew, Crazy Eights, Kings Corner, Concentration; a total of more than 40 games to choose from.

It has a good-looking 3D interface that's easy to use and figure out for each game. The app automatically saves your games and updates to new versions as you need or as you progress in skill.

Download CardShark ($2.99)

Gin Rummy Plus

In Gin Rummy Plus, you can play live against others from all over the world or invite your friends to play at your table. It features progressive jackpots and allows you to play at various skill levels; why not hop back onto a lower-level table to hone your skills before taking on a real card shark?

There's no need for in-app purchases in order to get more coins or progress through different games (but they're offered if you want). Every coin earned comes right from your own skill progression. The real-time leader boards keep things competitive and give you a heads-up when you're about to join a table of experts.

Download Gin Rummy Plus (Free with in-app purchases)

BlackJack 21

Sometimes you just want to play high stakes like you're in Las Vegas but not drop all that money. There's plenty of opportunities to improve your game, whether you're an old pro or brand new to the table. The live games against real players will teach you new strategies every time. You can opt to play live, or explore other tables to get an eye on the action.

If you play your best and crack the weekly top 10 leaderboard, you'll be eligible for fun in-app prizes! You also earn in-app Diamonds every time you play. Alternatively, you can opt to purchase them from the in-app store, but no purchase is necessary.

Download BlackJack 21 (Free with in-app purchases)

PokerStars Poker: Texas Holdem

You've seen the commercials for PokerStars, and it actually lives up to the hype, which isn't always the case for such an advertised app. The poker tables are suitable for all levels, and the app features a built-in support site and forums so you can get tips and tricks from the experts. Play in tournaments or quick Sit and Go games when you have limited time. If poker is a new game for you, the app will be your teacher, and no real money will be on the line.

It's a free download that offers in-app purchases if you want to play more competitively. You can select bundles of chips at various price points, or earn chips as you play and improve at the tables.

Download PokerStars Poker Texas Holdem (Free with in-app purchases)

Euchre Free

Euchre is a simple game to learn and it's played in quick rounds, called tricks. Four players play in teams of two, and the goal of the game is to play your highest cards one at a time to win all the cards on the table. You and your partner earn points by strategizing which cards are best to play and when to lay down your Trump cards.

A great feature in Euchre Free is the ability to choose who you partner with and who you play against. There are levels that range from beginner to expert, so you'll be well-matched at your table of choice. You can customize your backgrounds or use your own photos, which enhances the simple and smooth game interface. There are also hints and help available, as well as stats for every player at your table.

Download Euchre Free (Free)

Magic: 2015

The new offering from Magic is a build on Magic: The Gathering, in which you hunt mystical creatures across the Multiverse and earn cards you will use later to win battles. It's a strategy-based trading card game with the goal of creating the ultimate deck.

You can buy booster packs via in-app purchases if you don't want to wait to earn the big cards. You'll have the option to play against friends or strangers to test the strength and ingenuity of your deck, so make sure you've stacked it well. It all might sound a bit complicated if you never played the traditional Magic card game, but the introductory tutorial lays out all the rules and goals quite well for beginners.

Download Magic:2015 (Free with in-app purchases)

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer

Play in the world of Vigil, besieged by ancient monsters banished long ago and eager to return to terrorize your home. Build your arsenal of cards by earning Heroes and defeating Monster cards in every battle.

The game has an intricate backstory of characters and origins; you'll learn to manipulate the board with the help of The Enlightened and defeat your enemies with the knowledge of The Void. Your in-app purchases can be complex sets of cards or individual cards of high game value that are tough to earn.

Download Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (Free with in-app purchases)

Card Crawl

Card Crawl features solitaire-style gameplay served to you in four different game modes. Typical games last two to three minutes, so they're perfect for commutes or quickly passing some time when you're stuck standing in line.

As you play, you unlock ability cards and clear out dungeons to build your decks. You can check your progress against other players through an integrated leader board within Google Play.Try Card Crawl for free, and once you're hooked, you can continue via an in-app purchase

Download Card Crawl (Free with in-app purchases)

Exploding Kittens

Exploding Kittens plays like Russian Roulette: players draw cards until someone unfortunately draws an Exploding Kitten, which ends their game. You'll play in groups of two to five people, and you can choose to play against your friends or strangers.

It's a deceivingly simple game and you need a solid strategy to stay alive. Hilarious cards like Nothing but cat butt keep you laughing while you try desperately not to be killed right out of the game.

Download Exploding Kittens ($1.99)

Cribbage With Grandpas

Cribbage is one of those timeless card games that has been passed down from generation to generation, and that is reflected perfectly in Cribbage With Grandpas. It's a beautifully designed game which is unlike any other on the list, because you actually get to create and customize your opponent.

Not only are you able fine tune the look of your grandpa — perhaps you'll model yours after your own family's patriarch — but you're also able to tweak their skill level and personality. Cribbage is a very social game, so you'll be on the receiving end of some light-hearted ribbing as you play. If you're new to cribbage, this is a great introduction that lets you practice strategies and play as many games as you'd like. There's no multiplayer, but that's what the physical card game is for! This is a paid app so it might be a hard sell to someone who's never played cribbage before, but there's a fine reason why this game is so popular.

Download: Cribbage With Grandpas ($2.99)

Show your cards!

Got a favorite card game that you're hooked on? Shout it out in the comments below!

Updated August 2017: Added The Elders Scrolls: Legends to the list!

What are the best board games for Android?

Board games have been experiencing a renaissance in recent years, and it doesn't take a lot of digging in the Google Play Store to see it reflected on Android as well. If you're having trouble getting everybody together under one roof or just don't have any more shelf space for another box, pick up your Android phone or tablet to grab these fantastic board games.

We've put together the very best board games for Android for the consideration of long-time board game fans.It's worth noting in advance that a vast majority of the Android board games on our list employ in-app purchases for expansions, and thanks to their established physical counterparts, they tend to be well-balanced and lots of fun.

• Carcassonne
• Cribbage with Grandpas
• Pandemic: The Board Game
• Ticket to Ride
• Splendor
• Catan
• Shelter Free
• Sea Battle 2
• Mahjong: Beautiful Orient

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a tile-based kingdom-building game in which players each take turns trying to complete roads, cities, and cloisters. Each turn, players also drop a limited number of their meeple onto those landmarks in an attempt to claim points once the feature has been completed. If you can't fully enclose a city or finish a road by the end of the game, you can still get a few points. A handful of expansions are also available via in-app purchases.

Carcassonne is a polished adaptation of a classic board game and has just recently been re-released in 3D and it looks and plays better than ever! If you haven't played it before now is the time to check it out!

• Number of players: 1-6
• Options to play: Solo, local multiplayer, online multiplayer

Download Carcassonne ($1.99 w/ IAPs)

Cribbage with Grandpas

Cribbage is a mix between a card game and a board game, so it totally belongs here too. Cribbage with Grandpas is just a really charming indie game that's great for seasoned cribbage players along with people who are just learning the game. On top of just having a really clean and colorful design, Cribbage with Grandpas has gaming's first build-a-Grandpa feature where you can create the perfect opponents and tweak their personality and playing style.

Check out my full review and then fall in love with this great game.

• Number of players: 1
• Options to play: Solo

Download: Cribbage with Grandpas ($2.99)

Pandemic: The Board Game

This mobile version of the popular strategic board game of the same name that provides a real challenge whether you're playing alone or with friends. Your goal: Try to cure four contagious diseases from spreading and taking over the world.

You select your characters at the start of the game, with each character performing specific roles to help eradicate the diseases. Which characters you pick will have a big effect on your team's ultimate success. This is a pass-and-play game to play with friends, and you'll all have to work together and use your teams strategically if you want to win. There's an in-app purchase available for expansions, which improves the replayability of this addictive and challenging game.

• Number of players: 2-4, or solo if you play more than one role
• Options to play: Solo, pass-and-play

Download: Pandemic: The Board Game ($4.99)

Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride gets players to build sprawling rail empires by gathering colored cars to connect cities. Every turn, a player gets to either pick two cars, claim a line by spending cars, or take on a new ticket, which challenges players to connect two cities before the first player runs out of cars. The farther these two cities are, the more victory points they're worth, plus the player with the longest line gets an additional victory point bonus.

On the whole, Ticket to Ride is a fine combination of competition and construction. The in-app purchase grants you access to a new bundle of maps and boards, all of which are totally worth the price.

• Number of players: 1-5
• Options to play: Solo, Pass-and-play, local multiplayer, online multiplayer

Download Ticket to Ride ($6.99 w/ IAPs)

Splendor

Splendor is a game that's fast and easy to learn, but hard to master. You play as rich merchants during the Renaissance with the goal of earning 15 prestige points before your opponents. The game requires you to collect gems which are in turn spent on cards as you build out your empire.

The mobile version is a faithful adaptation of the tabletop version and lets you play pass-and-play style with friends, solo against the AI, or play online multiplayer matches. The game is fairly quick to play and a great game to play with the whole family.

• Number of players: 2-4
• Options to play: Solo mode, pass & play and online multiplayer

Download: Splendor ($6.99) {.cta .large

Catan

Catan is not just a classic board game; it is the classic board game. Players harvest resources and connect their villages by roads, accumulating victory points along the way. It doesn't sound like much, but between the inter-player trading (or scheming) and the cramped real estate, Catan can be a very tense game. Players also use their harvested resources to purchase cards which can provide them with useful resources. Pass-and-play multiplayer is available, as well as many of the original game's expansions.

For a tense game of wheeling and dealing, check out Catan.

• Number of players: 1-5
• Options to play: Solo, pass-and-play, online multiplayer

Download Catan ($4.99)

Shelter Free

Shelter Free combines deck-building card games and castle defence strategy. You wake up to find that the world is overrun with zombies and you have to continuously fight them off in order to make your way out of the danger zone. You move through hazards, seeking cards to build and strengthen your deck, and duelling with zombies who have equally powerful card decks.

The graphic novel artwork style is enough to keep you coming back for more gameplay, but the storyline and intense card battles will keep you hooked for sure.

• Number of players: 1
• Options to play: Solo

Download Shelter Free (Free w/ IAPs)

Sea Battle 2

Don't let anyone sink your battleship! This reimagining of the classic game lets you play against an AI, a random online opponent, or the person sitting next to you. It goes beyond mere battleships to include planes, radar, mines, submarines, and all the while you're climbing the ranks from a lowly recruit to an admired admiral. Name your proud fleet, watch your scores on the global leaderboard, and use the in-app chat feature to discuss strategy.

The old-school graph paper design will take you right back to playing sneaky Battleship rounds during junior high study hall.

• Number of players: 1-2
• Options to play: Solo, pass-and-play, local multiplayer over Bluetooth, online multiplayer

Download Sea Battle 2 (Free w/ IAPs)

Mahjong: Beautiful Orient

The 20 boards of Mahjong: Beautiful Orient feature beautiful backgrounds and a lovely soundtrack to listen to while you master Mahjong. The premise of the game is simple enough: match two tiles to remove them from the board. The boards increase in complexity as you advance, and you need to attain a preset minimum score to move on (not so simple now). Speed, accuracy, and a sharp eye are your must-have Mahjong tools.

If you love board games but you'd just rather play solo, Mahjong: Beautiful Orient is the game for you.

• Number of players: 1
• Options to play: Solo

Download Mahjong Beautiful Orient (Free w/ IAPs)

Your favorite Android board games?

Those are our picks, but there's a lot of great games in the Google Play Store. Leave a comment with your favorite board game or board adaptations for Android!

Updated December 2017: There's a new Carcassonne game that looks GREAT. Also added Splendor and Cribbage with Grandpas to our list.

Google will begin using the Landsat 8 satellite and new processing techniques to get even better shots of the earth than before. With Landsat 8, Google will be able to capture around two times as many images as it could with Landsat 7. Back in 2003, Landsat 7 experienced a hardware failure which resulted in a loss of image quality and diagonal gaps of missing data.

From Google's announcement post:

Today we're rolling out an even more beautiful and seamless version, with fresh imagery from Landsat 8 satellite and new processing techniques for sharper images than ever before. Satellite images are often cloudy, but not always over the same place, so we looked at millions of images and took the clearest pixels to stitch together this cloud-free and seamless image.

The images that are being captured are quite awesome, and you should check the rest out at over on Google's post.

"I saw on Facebook that ..." No. Stop. You didn't see anything on Facebook. You saw something that Facebook wanted you to click on.

I think at this point it's pretty clear that the "Brexit" aftermath — to say nothing of the political landscape in the United States — points to a sad reality.

We don't know what the hell we're talking about anymore. And I'm prepared to squarely lay the blame on one thing.

Facebook.

OK, that's not entirely true. I blame ourselves. We have all the power here, and none of the will. We scroll through our feeds in the morning — some 1 billion people every single day — and see all sorts of shocking clickbait. (You think one thing was going to happen. But when you click it, your jaw dropped!) It's generally pretty easy to identify, but we all click anyway.

More dangerous is the stuff that sounds plausible. Britons search for "What is the EU?" after the Brexit vote? Sure. But it's bullshit data, as former Googler Dan Morril rightfully pointed out.

"True enough" may be good enough to share, but that doesn't mean it's actually true.

Or the one that got me going early Saturday morning? "Google Play: Malicious Apps That Could Affect 90 Percent of Android Devices Discovered in App Store." That one was also true, but also bullshit. All you had to do was actually read the source material (and Jerry did a great job getting even more information from the source material behind that) to find out that, the "90 percent of Android devices" stuff was flat-out wrong. And that the exploit was fixed a year ago. And that this was yet another example of a security company trying to get you to buy its shit.

Those are but two examples from the past two days. And I'm not exactly telling anyone anything they shouldn't have already known here.

The question is why don't we care? Why do we refuse to put in even minimal effort to read more than one source. To read stories that maybe we disagree with, in hopes of becoming better informed about, well, all the things. To go just a little further than reading a summary on Facebook, then sharing it haphazardly.

Facebook indeed is all about bringing the world together. But that's to serve its greater purpose — to keep you clicking on things in Facebook. That's why we have clickbait headlines. That's why algorithms show you what you think you want to see.

Whether it's true or not? That's for you to figure out. Or not.

A few other thoughts on things ...

• I don't disagree with this. The DMCA was a good idea done badly and paved the way for the ridiculous "All copyright to the creator" lines you see alongside content that never should have been put online by someone else in the first place.
• If you don't own it, you shouldn't upload it. It's pretty simple.
• But how do you put the toothpaste back in the tube?
• YouTube pun intended.
• Um, great idea. But if you really want to know if Clean Master works, maybe ask someone other than the company that makes Clean Master. It's snake oil. Pure and simple.
• I ... just ... wow.
• And an update!!!
• And what are the odds of there being two sorts of TWRP?
• Excellent contest going on at TeslaCentral!
• And VRHeads has a killer contest going on, too.
• Glad to see LG launch a security site. (The "Security Bulletins" section is the part that addresses monthly updates.) But like I've said before, it's worthless if devices aren't actually being updated.
• A great launch from MrMobile last week. I know what he does isn't easy, but damned if I'm not jealous about how easy he makes it look. Video is hard.

That's it for this week. See y'all Monday.

Yahoo is rolling out an update for its Mail app that enhances the personalization features of the app, while also adding new productivity capabilities. The new Stationary feature allows you to send emails with professionally-drawn themes.

The new features you'll find in the app, according to Yahoo, include:

• Document Preview: Previewing an attachment will not only save you space and data, but you can now view large files on your phone or tablet significantly faster, without any download.
• Home Screen Widgets: We're adding a fourth widget that shows the unread message count for all your accounts and mailboxes.
• Disable Swiping: You ask, we deliver. We're bringing you the ability to turn off the swipe to delete functionality. Never accidentally delete an email again.
• Spacing: We want to make sure your inbox reads just how you like it. So, as many of you have requested, you can now choose five levels of inbox spacing, from super-dense (no avatars, no message snippet) to super-expanded (several lines of message snippet).
• Update to Themes: We've updated the dark grey theme to be extra-high-contrast.

The updated Yahoo Mail is rolling out on the Google Play Store now.