We have posted elsewhere about a quite remarkable Americana game, Bishops Whist, invented by Alphaeus T Dana in the 1890s. His book on the game began with an essay that filled half the pages, so we have decided to include it in its entirety hereunder: Dana's Essay (Mostly Historical) Wherein We Discern an Historical Apology for the Rankings in Bishops Whist In Charlemagnes day, a period in history wherein we behold the feudal system in the zenith of its strength, the gulf whi

Bishops Whist is a lost piece of Americana that reconsidered the nature of court cards and rationalised them. This is our Bishops Whist deck: The Bishops Whist cards The invention of one Alpheus T. Dana, it removed Ace,10, Jack, and added Knight, Bishop and Castle. With the King and Queen, it is the complement of the ranking chess pieces. A particularly novel aspect of the deck is that the knight cards are "pipless", that is, they don't belong to a suit. There are no survivin

Here is a pack of playing cards like no other, the six player Germanic bridge pack, based on our two International-style Germanic pattern cards: The six suited germanic Bridge back, for six player bridge We have already described our full Whist decks for the German and Swiss patterns here. We have made a full Ace-10, J Q K version of the patterns, enabling international games such as Bridge, Poker, and Klondike to be played with a familiar national pattern. Stepping back a pa

We have designed simplified international-style versions of the two Germanic patterns, the Austrian and the Swiss. These have come out of our recreations of the Austrian 5-suit bridge deck, which we have already described here. The 8 aces of the two patterns To recap, in the 1930s, the Marseille 5-suit bridge was facilitated by Piatnik incorporating a silhouetted green leaf pip design that matched the standard Piatnik French patterns. By way of explanation, there are two dist

This is our recreation and reimagining of the Victorian game of Tints by Jaques & Sons (188? ). We have recreated the colours based on modern colour theory, expanded the number of cards, and added index markers for ease of play. recreated and expanded Tints The Original Jaques Tints game Tints is a colour-based card pack, made for games where the colours enforce rules, but the games themselves readily belong in the standard game families. The original 28 cards were in 5 fam

This is our version of the splendid design for Frederick Crompton's American Fifth Suit: Invented in 1933, but not realised until the height of the 5-suit bridge craze in 1938, Dictators* was a game that combined elements of Auction Whist (auctioning, nominated trumps, contracts), Tarock (permanent trumps in the form of Atout cards), and Skat (the Widow Card). He seems (from the documentation) to have called his fifth suit Dictators. The rules are similar to the later 5-suit

We've discussed our recreation of the extraordinary Yankee Notions deck, probably devised by the chess and whist authority Thomas Frere. In this post we will introduce the games, and provide the originals, as well as a downloadable modernisation. Here is the complete set of 50 cards, to remind you If you want to buy a copy printed on demand at Make Playing Cards, you can do so here. The Deck 50 cards total, divided into two classes: Faces (Upper Ten) — caricature figures serv

We have already covered 5-suit bridge, Yankee Notions, and the historical Liechtenstein Patten. Now we present a different kind of fifth suit, our Motley Deck, wherein each card can match either black or red: On with the motley.... It uses as a pip design the Mephisto image from our recreation of the 19th century Game of Red and Black by Martin Gall, which explored the probability space of Roulette in cards. It uses a redrawn joker as Jack, Queen and King of Motley. We will

We have previously posted about Quintract Bridge (with five suits) and the Liechtenstein Pattern (also with five suits). Now it is the turn of Yankee Notions, an American original. Four new suits—Stars, Eagles, Flags and Crests—providing an American Nativist aura to the set, with a Faces suit fulfilling trump duties (perhaps inspired by the Tarock decks). There were no court cards: there was a Zero, or Z card at the apex of each suit. 16 new or adapted games were described

We mentioned in a previous post the mayfly life of the 1938 five suit bridge suits —Leaves, Crowns, Castles, & Eagle—that seem to have vanished as quickly as it arrived, lost to all but collectors. The reason for settling on 4 suits in card packs has been variously attributed to the number of the season (the four corners of the earths orbit), the four temperaments, the four elements to name a few. But on the way to four-suit modernity there were as many as 9 suits (in EG Ganj

"What will replace bridge" was a question that was constantly asked in the early 20th century, having evolved from Whist in Constantinople in the 1860s, and after being picked up along with cigarettes by the British in the Crimean war, arrived in the London clubs at the turn of the 19th century. * Answers included variously Reym (post here ), Grand, Manx, Ba-ka-lee, Tout-a-tout, and Buccaneer to name only a few. Various rules for scoring and bidding had come and gone in th

Almanac packs have the months of the year instead of court cards. Depending on the style and country, it can start in May or January, but generally there is a season per suit. This is the set of court cards for our PLM Agenda, featuring the designs by Jean Raoul Chaurand-Naurac for the 1926 Paris-Lyons-Mediteranean Rail Line ( Compagnie des Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée) : Here they are as a slideshow, showing the smart set enjoying their Art Deco leisu

This is a pack of cards that come out of an alternative history, where there is a fusion of the Swiss and Saxon patterns, resulting in only plant iconography. The idea is that a possible path in the evolution of card pack design could be to grow the number of cards, and have fewer suits. There is a precedent: the Liechtenstein pattern adds the Swiss Shields suit to the Latin pattern (Cups, Coins, Sticks and Swords), and some have two lower courts (Knight and Squire). Drawing

We mentioned in an earlier posting that we have been pursuing completions of the Germanic and Swiss pattern cards, to enable international games to be played in traditional card iconography. In this post we will discuss our Swiss Whist set. We did several things: we added an Ace, a 3,4 and 5 spot, made the common cards double-headed and added index markers. We kept the traditional court design because of the iconography of the Unter and Ober. The Unter figures hold the pip sy

While the French pattern became simplified and became the international convention for playing card design, the Germanic traditional patterns have by and large stayed with their ornate and symbolically rich designs. This means that making a full set of 52 cards for playing Whist and Poker required the addition of new designed cards: An Ace, and lower rank cards 3,4, and 5. German and Swiss cards are usually single-headed, we have made them double-headed, and added index marke

We mentioned a while ago Lewis Carroll's own card game, Court Circular , and provided instructions as to how you can play it with a regular pack of cards. But we also thought it would be nice to make a dedicated three-suit Snark pack, designed to play the game. It has three suits, Hearts, Diamonds and a red Club pattern we designed for our Stroop effect pack . It features portraits of the crew taking from Holiday's illustrations, including a proposed illustration of Boots. He

Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), famed for his portraits and his satirical Dance of Death woodcuts, also lent his hand to the margins of Erasmus’s celebrated text In Praise of Folly ( Moriae Encomium ). First published in 1511, Erasmus’s witty essay personifies Folly as a woman who praises her own influence over popes, princes, scholars, and common folk alike. It became one of the defining works of Renaissance humanism, mocking vanity and corruption with laughter rather tha

Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), famed for his portraits of Erasmus and Henry VIII, also produced a remarkable series of woodcuts in Basel in the 1520s. Published in 1538, these images became known as the Dance of Death . Each scene shows Death — a skeletal figure — intruding upon people of every rank: pope, emperor, merchant, child. The message was clear: mortality spares no one. What made Holbein’s version distinctive was its medium . Earlier Dance of Death cycles were fre

The Stroop effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby a person is liable to misread, or at least be slowed down in their reading, by a colour word written in a different hue. So BLUE and RED and GREEN will be misread, or at the very least cause confusion. You can read more about the Stroop Effect here . We thought it would be a useful tool to employ to give an expert card player an in-game handicap, without requiring any adjustment to the rules. Here are the four Aces: A

We've mentioned previously our Timon Schroeter Emblematic Cards reissue , as well as the Year 2000 Tarock . Another traditional Tarock deck uses Animals, often illustrations of Aesop's Fables. We recently made a new translation of Apollinaire's Bestiary, and when cleaning up the images, it occurred to us that they would make a splendid set of Atouts. And they did: We hand-coloured them to serve better as playing cards, and we added Orpheus as the wild card in play. Here are a