Cards and Card Games

I

Introduction

Cards and Card Games, sets of flat, usually rectangular pieces of pasteboard, cardboard, or plastic, generally ornamented with figures and numbers, used in playing various games of skill or chance. Playing cards began to be used in antiquity, perhaps originally for magical purposes and later as markers in games simulating battle maneuvers. Some scholars believe that cards originated in India as a derivative of the game of chess; other theories suggest that cards were first used in China or Egypt. From the Middle East they were, presumably, introduced into Europe by the Crusaders (See Crusades).

In China, one type of cards was apparently derived from paper money, another type from dominoes. In India, one of the best-known sets is the dasavatara. This is a deck of ten suits, based upon the ten avatars, or incarnations of the god Vishnu: fish, tortoise, wild boar, lion, dwarf, ax, bow and arrow, thunderbolt, conch, and horse. Most Indian cards are round, of various sizes, and usually made of heavily lacquered cardboard, papier-mâché, or occasionally ivory. In Japan, two popular decks are the hanafuda (“flower game”) and the utagaruta (“the game of 100 poets”).

The first mentions of playing cards in Europe date from the 13th and 14th centuries, and the earliest known examples were usually hand-painted paper. The cost of a single deck was prohibitive; their use was therefore restricted to the aristocracy. In 1397, however, a decree issued in Paris forbade the playing of cards by working people on working days. This seems to indicate that cards were mass produced, probably by wood-block printing, before the invention of the printing press. During the 15th century wood-block cards were designed in Germany and exported in great numbers. With the advances in printing, card playing increased in popularity.

II

Suit Designs

Types of playing cards and their designs, or suit symbols, vary throughout the world. The oldest European cards are of 14th-century Italian design. The origin of the suit signs now used almost universally can be traced to French designs that, when introduced into England, were named hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs.

---

---

III

The Standard Deck

Of the many types of playing-card decks, one of the oldest is the tarot deck. Designed in Italy in the early 14th century for the game of tarot, these cards are now best known as a fortune-telling medium. A tarot deck consists of 78 cards, 22 of which portray symbolic and allegorical objects or personages; the rest are numbered cards, from which evolved the 52-card decks that are used in England, France, the United States, and several other countries.

In the standard deck, each of the 4 suits comprises 13 cards, consisting of 3 court, or face cards (king, queen, and jack, which is called a knave in England), and cards numbered from ace to 10. In addition to these, one or two cards are known as jokers, which were introduced in the United States in 1872. Other changes in the standard deck have been few. The 52 cards are sometimes trimmed to 36 or 32 for the games of piquet, euchre, or bezique, or to 48 for games of the pinochle family. Double-headed court cards were created in France in the early 19th century to facilitate recognition of the cards being played. Indices—that is, the small suit symbols at opposite corners of cards—were added in the late 19th century so that a card hand could be held in a close fan with individual cards still distinguishable. Cards embossed in Braille are available, enabling the blind to play card games (See Braille System).

IV

Nonstandard Decks

Nonstandard playing-card decks abounded in Europe from the 17th to the 19th century. In England, from about 1670 to about 1720, a series of historical playing cards was issued. They were engraved with intricate comic-strip drawings, each depicting a significant event relating to the title of the deck. About 15 such decks were designed, among them “The Knavery of the Rump,” satirizing the Rump Parliament of Oliver Cromwell, “The Reign of Queen Anne,” and “Marlborough's Victories.” Many beautiful decks of cards were made in 18th- and 19th-century France. Of great interest are the revolutionary decks, which, instead of kings and queens, had cards representing “citizens,” and the exquisitely hand-colored costume cards, dating from the mid-19th century. The court cards of these latter decks represented actual people, dressed in the sumptuous costumes of the period.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all decks of cards, however, is the transformation deck. In the early 19th century, when no indices were yet used on cards, people would amuse themselves by trying to create drawings based on the pips, or suit symbols, on the cards. The term transformation refers to changing a plain card to a work of art. About 75 such decks were printed.