Increased interest in card games during the covid-19 pandemic

The covid-19 pandemic has had major effects on the world in a number of different ways. One of them is of course that we during the last couple of years have been more or less forced to spend more time at home. To keep ourselves busy while at home, many of us are spending more time online.

A good way to pass time online is to play games. One type of games that has seen an increase in  interest since the beginning of the pandemic are card games and especially online solitaire. If you look at Google trends you can see that there has been a steady rise in the searches for ”online solitaire” since the beginning of 2020.

Screenshot from Google Trends showing the search trend for ”online solitaire”.

From January 2020 to September 2021 the searches for ”online solitaire” increased by around 80 percent in the UK. The searches for ”card games online” have also increased over the last year and a half. Worth noticing is that the searches for ”card games online” increased with 400 percent form the end of January 2020 until the beginning of April 2020. Since then searches have decreased, but there are still more searches for the term then there were before the pandemic.

59% of global search from the US and the UK

According to Ahrefs.com, 41% of all global searches for ”card games” comes from the US. But the UK surprises with 18%, minding their population of 67 million, compared to 330 million in the US.

If you break down the numbers you can see that there are also regional differences within the UK. Scotland is the region with the most searches for ”online solitaire” with Wales in a close second. England is a bit further behind and in Northern Ireland solitaire doesn’t seem that popular.

For ”card games online” Wales is number one, while Scotland and England are almost tied for second place. Northern Ireland though is far behind, with 40 percent less searches for ”card games online” compared to Scotland. Again the Northern Irish don’t seem that amused by playing card online.

Another thing worth noticing is that the searches for ”online card games with friends” increased with over 1 000 percent during March 2020. This shows that people were looking for new ways to hang out with their friends when the first restrictions were imposed.

Global demand for card games online

UK is not the only country where online solitaire has seen an increase in popularity during the covid-19 pandemic. In Sweden the Google searches for solitaire card games more than doubled between February 2020 and May 2021 according to the Swedish card game site Allakortspel.se.

And if you look globally playing card games online seems to be the thing the world was doing during the spring of 2020. The global searches for ”card games online” spiked in April last year as an effect of the covid-19 pandemic as we can see in the graphics below.

Screenshot from Google Trends showing the search trend for ”card games online”.

The questions is if card games online still will be popular even after the pandemic is over? The answer is probably yes, even though people will of course not play as much as during the height of the pandemic in spring of last year.