Card game
A card game is any game that uses cards as the primary device with which the game is played, whether the cards are of a traditional design or specifically created for the game. Countless card games exist, including families of related games. A small number of card games played with traditional decks have formally standardized rules with international tournaments being held, but most are folk games whose rules may vary by region, culture, location or from circle to circle.
Traditional card games are played with a deck or pack of playing cards which are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. Normally the backs of the cards are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards may all be unique, or there can be duplicates. The composition of a deck is known to each player. In some cases several decks are shuffled together to form a single pack or shoe. Modern card games usually have bespoke decks, often with a vast amount of cards, and can include number or action cards. This type of game is colloquially regarded as part of the broader "board game" hobby.
Games using playing cards exploit the fact that cards are individually identifiable from one side only, so that each player knows only the cards they hold and not those held by anyone else. For this reason card games are often characterized as games of "imperfect information"—as distinct from games of perfect information, where the current position is fully visible to all players throughout the game. Many games that are not generally placed in the family of card games do in fact use cards for some aspect of their play.
Some games that are placed in the card game genre involve a board. The distinction is that the play in a card game chiefly depends on the use of the cards by players, while board games generally focus on the players' positions on the board, and use the cards for some secondary purpose.
History
9th to 13th centuries
Playing cards were likely invented during the Tang dynasty around the 9th century due to the technological impact of woodblock printing. A 9th century text known as the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang by Tang writer Su E references a leaf game that has been cited as a card game. However it is uncertain if it was actually a card game.The reference describes Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing the "leaf game" in 868 with her husband's family. The first known book on the "leaf" game was called the Yezi Gexi and allegedly written by a Tang woman. It received commentary by writers of subsequent dynasties. The Song dynasty scholar Ouyang Xiu asserts that the "leaf" game existed at least since the mid-Tang dynasty and associated its invention with the development of printed sheets as a writing medium. However, Ouyang also claims that the "leaves" were pages of a book used in a board game played with dice, and that the rules of the game were lost by 1067.
The earliest dated instance of a game involving cards occurred on 17 July 1294 when the Yuan dynasty Department of Punishments caught two gamblers, Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Zhugou, playing with paper cards. Wood blocks for printing the cards were impounded, together with nine of the actual cards. No description of the card game being played was provided.
Other games revolving around alcoholic drinking involved using playing cards of a sort from the Tang dynasty onward. However, these cards did not contain suits or numbers. Instead, they were printed with instructions or forfeits for whoever drew them. A playing card for a wine drinking game dating to the Yuan period reads:
14th and 15th centuries
The earliest European mention of playing cards appears in 1371 in a Catalan language rhyme dictionary. This suggests that cards may have been "reasonably well known" in Catalonia at that time, perhaps introduced as a result of maritime trade with the Mamluk rulers of Egypt. It is not until 1408 that the first card game is described in a document about the exploits of two card sharps; although it is evidently very simple, the game is not named. In fact the earliest game to be mentioned by name is Karnöffel, first mentioned in 1426 and which is still played in several forms today, including Bruus, Knüffeln, Kaiserspiel and Styrivolt. Ronfa and Condemnade are also recorded during the 15th century.Since the arrival of trick-taking games in Europe in the late 14th century, there have only been two major innovations. The first was the introduction of trump cards with the power to beat all cards in other suits; the other being the idea of bidding. Such cards were initially called trionfi and first appeared with the advent of Tarot cards in which there is a separate, permanent trump suit comprising a number of picture cards. The first known example of such cards was ordered by the Duke of Milan around 1420 and included 16 trumps with images of Greek and Roman gods. Thus games played with Tarot cards appeared very early on and spread to most parts of Europe with the notable exceptions of the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Balkans. However, we do not know the rules of the early Tarot games; the earliest detailed description in any language being those published by the Abbé de Marolles in Nevers in 1637.
The concept of trumps was sufficiently powerful that it was soon transferred to games played with far cheaper ordinary packs of cards, as opposed to expensive Tarot cards. The first of these was Triomphe, the name simply being the French equivalent of the Italian trionfi. Although not testified before 1538, its first rules were written by a Spaniard who left his native country for Milan in 1509 never to return; thus the game may date to the late 15th century.
Others games that may well date to the 15th century are Gleek, Pochen – the game of Bocken or Boeckels being attested in Strasbourg in 1441 – and Thirty-One, which is first mentioned in a French translation of a 1440 sermon by the Italian, Saint Bernadine, the name actually referring to two different card games: one like Pontoon and one like Commerce.
16th century
In the 16th century printed documents replace handwritten sources and card games become a popular topic with preachers, autobiographists and writers in general. A key source of the games in vogue in France and Europe at that time is François Rabelais, whose fictional character Gargantua played no less than 30 card games, many of which are recognisable. They include: Aluette, Bête, Cent, Coquimbert, Coucou, Flush or Flux, Gé, Gleek, Lansquenet, Piquet, Post and Pair, Primero, Ronfa, Triomphe, Sequence, Speculation, Tarot and Trente-et-Un; possibly Rams, Mouche and Brandeln as well. Girolamo Cardano also provides invaluable information including the earliest rules of Trappola. Among the most popular were the games of Flusso and Primiera, which originated in Italy and spread throughout Europe, becoming known in England as Flush and Primero.In Britain the earliest known European fishing game was recorded in 1522. Another first was Losing Loadum, noted by Florio in 1591, which is the earliest known English point-trick game. In Scotland, the game of Mawe, testified in the 1550s, evolved from a country game into one played at the royal Scottish court, becoming a favorite of James VI. The ancestor of Cribbage – a game called Noddy – is mentioned for the first time in 1589, "Noddy" being the Knave turned for trump at the start of play.
17th century
The 17th century saw an upsurge in the number of new games being reported as well as the first sets of rules, those for Piquet appearing in 1632 and Reversis in 1634. The first French games compendium, La Maison Académique, appeared in 1654 and it was followed in 1674 by Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester, although an earlier manuscript of games by Francis Willughby was written sometime between 1665 and 1670. Cotton records the first rules for the classic English games of Cribbage, a descendant of Noddy, and Whist, a development of English Trump or Ruff in which four players were dealt 12 cards each and the dealer 'robbed' from the remaining stock of 4 cards.Piquet was a two-player, trick-taking game that originated in France, probably in the 16th century and was initially played with 36 cards before, around 1690, the pack reduced to the 32 cards that gives the Piquet pack its name. Reversis is a reverse game in which players avoid taking tricks and appears to be an Italian invention that came to France around 1600 and spread rapidly to other countries in Europe.
In the mid-17th century, a certain game named after Cardinal Mazarin, prime minister to King Louis XIV, became very popular at the French royal court. Called Hoc Mazarin, it had three phases, the final one of which evolved into a much simpler game called Manille that was renamed Comète on the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1682. In Comète the aim is to be first to shed all one's hand cards to sequences laid out in rows on the table. However, there are certain cards known as 'stops' or hocs: cards that end a sequence and give the one who played it the advantage of being able to start a new sequence. This concept spread to other 17th and 18th century games including Poque, Comete, Emprunt, Manille, Nain Jaune and Lindor, all except Emprunt being still played in some form today.
It was the 17th century that saw the second of the two great innovations being introduced into trick-taking games: the concept of bidding. This first emerged in the Spanish game of Ombre, an evolution of Triomphe that "in its time, was the most successful card game ever invented." Ombre's origins are unclear and obfuscated by the existence of a game called Homme or Bête in France, ombre and homme being respectively Spanish and French for 'man'. 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 and known as Quadrille, Quintille, Médiateur and Solo. Quadrille went on to become highly fashionable in England during the 18th century and is mentioned several times, for example, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
The first rules of any game in the German language were those for Rümpffen published in 1608 and later expanded in several subsequent editions. In addition, the first German games compendium, Palamedes Redivivus appeared in 1678, containing the rules for Hoick, Ombre, Picquet, Rümpffen and Thurnspiel.