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

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

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

We discussed in our last post how we have recreated Timon Schroeter's Emblematic Cards as a 500 deck , using fashion prints. We also used the pattern to take another look at the tradional tarock packs, re-examining the rationale behind the popular Johann Nejedly design in use around the world. His Atout (trump) cards represent scenes of life of an ancient modernity, of Industrie und Glück (industry and happiness) from his own time. On the Roman Numeral numbered cards, one si

The German Educationalist Timon Schroeter designed a new pattern of playing cards based on a synthesis of the Swiss and French patterns. We read in a contemporary account In 1897, Dr Timon Schroeter donated 2,000 square metres of land in the western district of Jena for the construction of a home for the homeless. Since then, art cards - building stones - have been put into circulation at prices of 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 Marks, and by the end of 1892 a total of 75,

This is a new version of the traditional Korean playing cards tujeon (투전, 鬪牋) —literally "fighting tablets" — in modern international style. It is an 8 suit, 10 cards-per-suit, pack, with a suit for each of the 8 cardinal points of the compass. In each suit there are 9 numbered cards and one General card that is of a different, but associated kind. Man/King; Fish/Dragon; Crow/Phoenix; Pheasant/Falcon; Roe-Deer/Lion; Rabbit/Eagle; Horse/Wagon; Star/North Star The Tujeon trad

On November 23, 1902, the Los Angeles Times published a detailed description of a new card game that had been "introduced into Pasadena"...

On the 3rd of December, 1904, The Indianapolis News published a brief notice about a new card game called "Euclid," invented by E. J....

On January 16, 1860, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll—created a unique card game that he called "Court...

In the spring of 1911, a new card game called "Tootatoo" (or "Tout Atout" in its more elegant French form, meaning "All Trumps") burst...

On the 22nd of November, 1928, the New York Leader reported on a new card game called "Card Roulette" that had been introduced by...

Kopa is a courtless* card game of 60 cards, in 4 suits, numbered 1 to 15. The four suits are named for mediaeval heraldic tinctures:...

Our purpose is recovery and creation of traditional card games. Sometimes, it is a game that was once popular and is forgotten. Other...