Card game

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 17th of July 1294, officers of the Yuan dynasty Department of Punishments caught two gamblers named Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Zhugou playing with paper cards. The officers impounded the wood blocks used to print the cards, along with nine of the actual cards themselves. No one wrote down what game the two men were playing. That single arrest record is the earliest dated instance in the world of a game involving cards. A card game is any game in which cards are the primary device of play. The cards might follow a traditional design or be made specifically for one game. Countless of them exist, gathered into families of related games. But how did a sheet of printed paper become the engine of poker, bridge, tarot, and a children's game like Old Maid? Why are some of these games governed by international federations while most remain folk games whose rules drift from one circle to the next? And what hidden feature of a piece of card made all of this possible in the first place?

• 2. Imperfect Information

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  Cards are identifiable from one side only. Each player can read the faces of their own cards but knows nothing of what their opponents hold. This single fact is what card games exploit. Because the back of every card is meant to be indistinguishable, the current position is never fully visible to everyone at the table. For this reason card games are often described as games of imperfect information. That phrase stands in contrast to games of perfect information, where the whole position is on view to all players throughout. A deck is a pack of cards identical in size and shape, each with a face and a back. The composition of the deck is known to every player, even if the locations of individual cards are not. Sometimes several decks are shuffled together to form a single pack or shoe. Some games sorted into the card-game genre even involve a board. The line that separates them from board games is which element carries the play. In a card game the board only guides scorekeeping or card placement, while in a board game the players' positions on the board matter most and the cards serve a secondary purpose. That distinction would soon be tested by a wave of new games carrying a strange new kind of card.

• 3. The Leaf Game

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  Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, was recorded playing the leaf game in the year 868 with members of the Wei clan, her husband's family. The account survives in a 9th-century text called the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by the Tang writer Su E. It is the oldest surviving reference to a card game in world history, though it is uncertain whether the leaf game was truly a card game at all. Playing cards were likely invented during the Tang dynasty, around the 9th century, made possible by the technology of woodblock printing. The Song dynasty scholar Ouyang Xiu, who lived from 1007 to 1072, claimed the leaf game existed at least since the mid-Tang dynasty. He tied its invention to the rise of printed sheets as a writing medium. Yet Ouyang also muddied the picture. He said the leaves were pages of a book used in a board game played with dice, and that the rules had been lost by 1067. Some early Chinese cards had no suits or numbers. A surviving wine-drinking card from the Yuan period, dated between 1271 and 1368, carries a verse about a man from Qi who begs for leftovers. Its instructions direct whoever draws it to take an old cup of wine, drink a little, then beg for food from the guests and brag, while others at the party mock him as his wife and concubine.

• 4. Arrival In Europe

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  In 1371 a Catalan rhyme dictionary made the earliest European mention of playing cards. This suggests cards were reasonably well known in Catalonia by that time, perhaps carried there by maritime trade with the Mamluk rulers of Egypt. An almost complete Mamluk Egyptian deck of 52 cards has survived from around the same period, in a distinct oriental design. Its four suits were swords, polo sticks, cups and coins, and its ranks ran king, governor, second governor, and ten down to one. The earliest references in Europe speak of a Saracen or Moorish game called naib. The first card game to be described appears in a 1408 document about two card sharps. The game is plainly very simple, but it is never named. For the first game known by name, one must wait until 1426 and Karnöffel, still played today in forms such as Bruus, Knüffeln, Kaiserspiel and Styrivolt. Ronfa and Condemnade also turn up during the 15th century. In the 1430s Italy produced the tarot deck, a full Latin-suited pack augmented by suitless picture cards that played a special role as trumps. The first such cards were ordered by the Duke of Milan around 1420 and included 16 trumps showing Greek and Roman gods. Tarot games spread to most of Europe, with the notable exceptions of the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans. Their early rules are lost, the earliest detailed description being one published by the Abbé de Marolles in Nevers in 1637.

• 5. Trumps And Bidding

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  Since trick-taking games arrived in Europe in the late 14th century, only two great innovations have entered them. The first was the trump card, able to beat all cards in other suits. Such cards were first called trionfi and appeared with tarot, where a separate permanent trump suit of picture cards held sway. The power of the trump was soon transferred to far cheaper ordinary packs. The first such game was Triomphe, its name the French equivalent of the Italian trionfi. Its first rules were written by a Spaniard who left for Milan in 1509 and never returned, so the game may date to the late 15th century. The second innovation was bidding, which first emerged in the 17th century in the Spanish game of Ombre, an evolution of Triomphe that in its time was the most successful card game ever invented. In Ombre the player who won the bidding became the Man and played alone against the other two. The game spread rapidly across Europe, spawning variants for different numbers of players, known as Quadrille, Quintille, Médiateur and Solo. Quadrille grew highly fashionable in 18th-century England. It is mentioned several times in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. A French five-trick gambling game called Bête also arrived in the 17th century, spreading to Germany as La Bete and to England as Beast. A derivative of Triomphe, it was the first card game in history to introduce bidding into play.

• 6. Five Ways To Play

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  Parlett and McLeod group card games chiefly by mechanism, into five categories: outplay, card exchange, hand comparison, layout, and a miscellaneous category covering combat and compendium games. Outplay games are easily the largest, with players holding a hand and playing it out to the table until their cards run out. Trick-taking games are the largest category of outplay games. In plain-trick games such as Bridge, Whist and Spades, the aim is to win tricks without regard to the actual cards captured. In point-trick games the count of tricks is immaterial and what matters is the point value of the cards taken. All point-trick games are European or of European origin and include the tarot games. Card exchange games form another large category, in which players swap cards with the table or with each other to collect specific combinations, the rummy family being the best known. Hand comparison games are mostly gambling games. Their main groups are vying games, where players bet on who holds the best hand, and banking games, where players compete against a banker rather than one another. The best known vying game in the world is Poker, itself a family with over 100 variants. Popular banking games include Blackjack and Baccarat. Pontoon, a cousin of Blackjack, emerged from the trenches of the First World War to become a popular British family game.

• 7. How A Deck Took Shape

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  Around 1480 the French suits were introduced and largely replaced the earlier Latin suits of swords, clubs, cups and coins in France. Those Latin suits survive in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries and some northern regions of Italy. The French symbols were simple and single-color, so they could be stamped onto cards, requiring full-color art only for the court cards. This drastically simplified production compared with the traditional Italian deck, which used unique art for every card. The French suits reached English playing cards in the 16th century, despite the historic animosity between France and England, and travelled on to British colonies including North America. The best-known deck internationally is the English pattern of the 52-card French deck, also called the International or Anglo-American pattern. It holds one card for each combination of thirteen ranks and four French suits: spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. The term knave was once more common than jack. The card had been called a jack within the terminology of all-fours since the 17th century, but the word was considered vulgar. In Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Estella exclaims, "He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!" Because the abbreviation Kn was so close to that of the king, the two were easily confused once suits and rankings moved to the corners of the card. The earliest deck to place indices in the corner dates from 1693, but such cards became common only after 1864, when Hart reintroduced them along with the knave-to-jack change. In Japan, a distinct 48-card hanafuda deck remains popular, derived from 16th-century Portuguese decks after a long evolution driven by Tokugawa shogunate laws that tried to ban playing cards.

• 8. Who Makes The Rules

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  When Whist became popular in 18th-century England, players in the Portland Club agreed on a set of house rules for use on its premises. Players at other clubs then chose to follow the Portland Club rules rather than codify and print their own. Those rules eventually became generally accepted across England and Western cultures. There is nothing static or official about this process. A new card game starts in a small way, as an invention or a modification of an existing game, and those playing it may change the rules as they wish. The rules they settle on become their house rules. Many widely played games such as Canasta and Pinochle have no official regulating body, and the most common ruleset is no more than that. An early compilation of popular card games was collected by Edmund Hoyle, a self-made authority on parlor games. The U.S. Playing Card Company now owns the Hoyle brand and publishes rulebooks that have largely standardized games where they are widely distributed. A handful of games do have governing bodies. Tournament bridge is governed by the World Bridge Federation, and by local bodies such as the American Contract Bridge League and the English Bridge Union. Skat is governed by The International Skat Players Association and, in Germany, by the Deutscher Skatverband, which publishes the Skatordnung. French tarot answers to the Fédération Française de Tarot, and Schafkopf to the Schafkopfschule in Munich. Even then the rules bind only at sanctioned games. The shadow of the church once fell over the whole pastime: on the 17th of October 1750, Pope Benedict XIV banned card games, on the basis of their association with gambling.