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