Early access
Card games, played at your own pace.
Play the way correspondence chess works. Take your turn when you have time. Your opponent gets a nudge. The game waits.
How it works
Your game waits for you
A table lives in the database, not in a browser tab. Close it, come back on Thursday, and every card is where you left it.
Take your turn from your phone
Draw, play a card, tap it, change your life total, pass. Your opponent gets a nudge by email and the game goes back to waiting.
Bring the deck you already have
Paste in a list from wherever you build decks. The cards get matched up for you, and everyone at the table sees the deck's name once play starts.
Nobody has to be online
Two players, two time zones, two schedules that never line up. The game does not care. It has been waiting all week.
A three-hour game, three minutes at a time
The problem was never that the game is too long. It is that it wants three uninterrupted hours from four people on the same evening, and those evenings stopped happening.
So the table waits instead. You take a turn on the bus. Your opponent takes theirs after the kids are down. A game finishes over a week, and it still counts.
There is no referee, on purpose
Slowdraw keeps track of structure: whose turn it is, where every card sits, what changed and in what order. It does not know the rules of any card game and never will. Nothing stops you drawing eight cards.
That is how a kitchen table works, and it is why every card and every format is welcome here rather than only the ones someone had time to program. When you disagree, there is a permanent log of every action to look at, which is more than a webcam gives you.
And you choose who you sit with. Someone who cheats gets played with once. Someone who vanishes mid-game shows up as someone who vanishes mid-game.
What about instants?
This is the question that makes people say async card games cannot work, so here is the answer. Either player can raise a flag that pauses the game and asks the other to respond. The active player stops, the other gets a nudge, and the window has its own clock, six hours by default.
If the window passes with no answer, play resumes. Nobody can freeze a game by going quiet, and nobody has to sit and wait. The active player can also just ask, rather than guess.
It costs you nothing from your deck. No cards are banned to make this work.
What you can play
Magic: The Gathering today, in Commander, Standard, Modern, Pioneer, Legacy, Pauper, or no format at all if you would rather just play. Format legality is shown as a label and never enforced, because that is the players' business.
A second game is planned. The table was built so that adding one is a data problem, not a rewrite.
Start with a deck you already own
Paste the list, pick an opponent or open a table for anyone, and take your first turn whenever you like.