Playing Card Divination

nonstandard playing cards

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.

card games

Recorded evidence of the existence of playing cards--usually in the form of ordinances prohibiting their use--does not appear in Europe until the 14th century. (The varieties of Chinese and Indian cards are far older.) Tarot cards were the first type to appear in the Western world. Neither the origin of the tarot deck, nor its original purpose, is known with certainty. The popular belief that the deck was devised for fortune-telling is denied by many scholars.

Designed in the Middle Ages, the tarot deck reflected medieval society, where kings ruled a world that was divided into four broad classes: the church, the military, merchants, and farmers. Thus, in addition to the cards of the major arcana--the symbolic picture cards for which the tarot deck is still famous--the deck included 56 cards divided into four suits: cups (the church); swords (the military); pentacles, or 5-pointed stars (merchants); and batons (farmers).

These first decks were made by hand, and only the wealthy could afford them. When the printing press was invented in the 15th century, cards were reproduced by means of hand-colored woodcuts and, later, engravings. Their popularity spread rapidly across the continent. The old tarot cups soon became hearts, the swords became spades, the pentacles became diamonds, and the batons, clubs. In Germany, however, hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells illustrated the four suits.

The French had the greatest influence on the creation of the modern deck. They eliminated the major arcana and combined the knight and page, reducing the size of the deck to 52 cards and simplifying the suit symbols to plain red hearts and diamonds, black spades and trefoils (clover leaves). This simplification allowed the deck to be more easily printed and lowered its cost. The French also began to identify the court cards. The king of hearts was Charlemagne, for example; of diamonds, Julius Caesar; of spades, King David; and of clubs, Alexander the Great.

Card designs remained basically the same until the mid-19th century. Double-headed court cards, and indices--the small suit-number identification in the card corners--were both innovations of the 1800s. Card backs were usually plain until the 1850s, when the English artist Owen Jones designed a number of ornate backs. Complex back designs then began to be printed on most decks. The first joker appeared in 1865 in an American deck.

Although early card makers often signed their products, the inventors of card games remain anonymous. From the 17th century on, innumerable books on "gaming" accompanied the card-playing fever that had developed with the increasing availability of cards. The first accurate compendiums of rules, however, were those of the English writer Edmond Hoyle, in his treatise on whist (1742) and his later works on other games. His books became immensely popular, and the expression "according to Hoyle" still means to play strictly by the rules.

Most card games can be classified according to their basic structure. Games of rank include the various tarot games and the many games based on the old game of triomphe (triumph in England), a trump-card game that evolved into the German skat, as well as whist, euchre, ecarte, and bridge. These games are usually played with three or four players, each bidding for the opportunity to play out their hand by specifying the number of tricks (one trick being the cards played in one round) the hand may be able to take. Tricks are taken by the cards of highest rank. The trump suit outranks all other suits.

Games of combination can be divided into two types. The first are those which require combinations of sets (3 or 4 cards of a kind) or groups (3 or more cards in sequence). The second are those which require groups of cards that add up to a predetermined score. Poker and all  games fall into the first group. The second group includes cribbage and games such as casino and blackjack.

In some games, where both combination and rank are important, the object is to score combinations and also to win points by rank. Bezique, a 19th-century French game, was the forerunner of , several versions of which are widely played in the United States. The primary object of such games is to "meld"--to declare certain cards or combinations that are each worth points--and then to take tricks using both cards of ranked value and trump cards.

In solitaires, games played by one person, all the cards in the deck must be brought into a predetermined order according to certain rules. There are at least 350 solitaire versions; some can be played with two or more players.

The most popular card games in gambling casinos are blackjack and its variants. These are also known as banking games, because the casino's dealer opposes all other players and controls the deal and the "bank." Blackjack (vingt-et-un) is the generic casino game. It requires players to ask for cards one at a time until they reach a total of 21 or a number as close as possible to but less than 21. Baccarat and chemin de fer are similar, except that only two or three cards are dealt, and the winning number is 9.

Another large category of card games are those played by children. Many involve simply collecting combinations ("Have you any threes?" "Go Fish"--whereupon the first player takes a card from the pile of undealt cards) or being quicker to slap or cover a card (Slapjack, Spit). Some children's games, however, are fairly complex (Concentration, Cuckoo, Frogs in the Pond). Special decks of cards designed to teach (for example, Authors, which features pictures of famous writers; or Geography, with maps of continents and countries) have also been popular.

Margery B. Griffith