Bid Whist Forever Is on the App Store

Somebody at every family table has a phone out between hands. Now that phone can hold the table.

Bid Whist Forever is on the App Store. It’s free, it’s built for iPhone and iPad, and you don’t need an account to pull up a chair. Search Bid Whist Forever in the App Store, or go straight there:

Download on the App Store →

On Android or at a desk? The same game runs in your browser at app.bidwhistforever.com. One account, one rep, one table — whichever door you come in through. Everything on the Get the App page, including a code you can scan from your computer.

What you’re sitting down to

For everybody who has been playing in the browser since July: it’s the same table, now a real app on your home screen, with the same account and the same rep you’ve already earned.

For everybody who hasn’t: here’s the short version of what’s inside.

• A full cast to play against. More than forty characters, from the front porch to the Old Heads, each with a hometown, a signature move, and a way of playing you’ll learn to read. Every seat fills in seconds, so a solo game is never a wait. Meet the table.
• Your people, at your table. Every table gets a six-character code. Text the link, they tap it, they’re seated — no account required on their end. Partners play together, tournaments seed by partnership, and your Fam has a home.
• The game, played right. No kitty. Bids one through seven, uptown or downtown, no trump doubles. Bostons are Bostons. If your grandmother would call it a renege, the app does too. The rules.
• Learn at the table, not from a manual. Guided lessons walk you through bidding, calling trump, and running a hand, with hints you can turn up, turn down, or turn off. If you play Spades, you’ll be bidding by your second hand. Learn in sixty seconds.
• A journey worth the climb. Beat the front porch, earn your way up the tiers, and unlock the tables and the players who only sit with people who’ve earned it. Card backs, table settings, and rep travel with you.

A word about the road here

This started as a way to keep a game alive that raised a lot of us — one that lived in kitchens and church basements and dorm rooms and on the trains that carried it city to city. Getting it into the App Store meant a summer of testing with family on four phones at once, a rejection over an iPad menu nobody could reach, a fix the same day, and an approval right behind it. The dev diaries have the whole story if you like that sort of thing.

What it means for you is simpler: the table is open, it’s free, and it’s in your pocket.

Two small asks

Leave a rating. The App Store shows the game to the next family based on what this one says about it. If it earned a minute of your time, a rating on the store page is the biggest thing you can do for it.

Tell us what’s off. A hand that felt wrong, a bid the app should have allowed, a word that doesn’t sound like your table. Send it in. The table gets better the way it always has: somebody speaks up.

Next stop

Thursday, something new starts on this porch. The game has always traveled — house to house, hall to hall, campus to campus — and this fall we start telling that story, one stop at a time, with the people you’ve been playing against. Invitations go out first.

Until then: download the app, sit down, and play the hand in front of you.

Family’s waiting.