Anchor each suit on its seven and lay cards up and down the rows to shed your hand first.
The seven of diamonds opens play. From each seven, suits grow outward in both directions: eight, nine and up, or six, five and down. If you have no legal card to add, you must pass.
This game has more names than most: Sevens in much of the world, Card Dominoes or Parliament in Britain, Fan Tan in the United States, and Spoof or simply Domino elsewhere. The proliferation is itself the clue — it spread by being taught, not published.
The name that describes it best is Card Dominoes. Play builds outward in suit from an agreed starting rank, usually a seven, running up and down until the layout is a set of sequences on the table. A player who cannot extend one must pass or draw.
It sits between two families, which is unusual. The shedding goal belongs to games like crazy eights; the growing tableau belongs to patience. The result is a game simple enough for children learning card values, in which the real skill is holding back the card that would open a suit for everyone else.
Sevens is an original free browser version of the classic layout-and-shed card game, a tense game of blocking and timing. No download or account needed.