Playing Cards

A playing card is a typically hand-sized piece of heavy paper or thin plastic. A complete set of cards is a pack or deck. A deck of cards is used for playing one of many card games, some of which include gambling.

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Playing Cards - Overview

A playing card is a typically hand-sized piece of heavy paper or thin plastic. A complete set of cards is a pack or deck. A deck of cards is used for playing one of many card games, some of which include gambling. Because they are both standard and commonly available, playing cards are often adapted for other uses, such as magic tricks, cartomancy, encryption, or building a house of cards.

The front (or "face") of each card carries markings that distinguish it from the other cards and determine its use under the rules of the game being played. The back of each card is identical for all cards, usually a plain color or abstract design. In most games, the cards are assembled into a deck, and their order is randomized by shuffling.


History

The origin of playing cards is obscure, but it is almost certain that they began in China after the invention of paper. Ancient Chinese "money cards" have four "suits": coins (or cash), strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), myriads of strings, and tens of myriads. These were represented by ideograms, with numerals of 2–9 in the first three suits and numerals 1–9 in the "tens of myriads". Wilkinson suggests in The Chinese origin of playing cards that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which were both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for.

The designs on modern Mahjong tiles likely evolved from those earliest playing cards. However it may be that the first deck of cards ever printed was a Chinese domino deck, in whose cards we can see all the 21 combinations of a pair of dice. In Kuei-t'ien-lu, a Chinese text redacted in the 11th century, we find that dominoes cards were printed during the T’ang dynasty, contemporary to the first books. The Chinese word paii is used to describe both paper cards and gaming tiles.

An Indian origin for playing cards has been suggested by the resemblance of symbols on some early European decks (traditional Sicilian cards, for example) to the ring, sword, cup, and baton classically depicted in the four hands of Indian statues. This is an area that still needs research.


Spread through Europe

In the late 1300s, the use of playing cards spread rapidly across Europe. The first widely accepted references to cards are in 1371 in Spain, in 1377 in Switzerland, and, in 1380, they are referenced in many locations including Florence, Paris, and Barcelona. A Paris ordinance dated 1369 does not mention cards; its 1377 update includes cards. In the account-books of Johanna, duchess of Brabant, and her husband, Wenceslaus of Luxemburg, there is an entry dated May 14, 1379 as follows: "Given to Monsieur and Madame four peters, two forms, value eight and a half moutons, wherewith to buy a pack of cards". An early mention of a distinct series of playing cards is the entry of Charles or Charbot Poupart, treasurer of the household of Charles VI of France, in his book of accounts for 1392 or 1393, which records payment for the painting of three sets or packs of cards, which were evidently already well known.

It is clear that the earliest cards were executed by hand, like those designed for Charles VI. However, this was quite expensive, so other means were needed to mass-produce them. It is possible that the printing of woodcuts on paper developed because of the demand for implements of play. The technique of printing woodcuts was transferred from use to decorate fabric to use on paper around 1400, very shortly after the first recorded manufacture of paper in Christian Europe, as opposed to Islamic Spain where it was much older (see Old master print for this). No examples from before 1423 survive, but it is clear that most cards of that period were printed as woodcuts by the early card makers or cardpainters of Ulm, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, from about 1418 to 1450. and that playing cards competed with devotional images as the most common uses for woodcut in this period.

Most early woodcuts of all types were coloured after printing, either by hand or, from about 1450 onwards, stencils. No woodcut playing cards exist whose creation can be confirm


Design Changes

In early games the kings were always the highest card in their suit. However, as early as the late 1400s special significance began to be placed on the nominally lowest card, now called the Ace, so that it sometimes became the highest card and the Two, or Deuce, the lowest. This concept may have been hastened in the late 1700s by the French Revolution, where games began being played "ace high" as a symbol of lower classes rising in power above the royalty.

The term "Ace" itself comes from a dicing term in Anglo-Norman language, which is itself derived from the Latin as (the smallest unit of coinage). Another dicing term, trey, sometimes shows up in playing card games.

The joker is an American innovation. Created for the Alsatian game of Euchre, it spread to Europe from America along with the spread of Poker. The joker was ideated around 1865 by Samuel Hart. The initial denomination of the card was Best or Imperial Bower (Bauer or Boer in German language is the name of the jack of trump in the game of Euchre). From the Alsatian name of the game, Juker, derived the actual appellative of the card. Although the joker card often bears the image of a fool (possibly derived from the stereotypical village idiot), which is one of the images of the Tarot deck, it is not believed that there is any relation. In contemporary decks, one of the two jokers is often more colorful or more intricately detailed than the other, though this feature is not used in most card games. The two jokers are often differentiated as "Big" and "Little," or more commonly, "Red" and "Black." In many card games the jokers are not used. Unlike face cards, the design of jokers varies widely. Many manufacturers use them to carry trademark designs.

In the twentieth century, a means for coating paper cards with plastic was invented, and has taken over the market, producing a durable product. An example of what the old cardboard product was like is documented in Buster Keaton's silent comedy The Navigator, in which the forlorn comic tries to shuffle and play cards during a rainstorm. Cards made entirely of plastic were also developed, and are known for their increased durability over plastic coated cards.


Alleged Symbolism

Popular legend holds that the composition of a deck of cards has religious, metaphysical or astronomical significance: typical numerological elements of the explanation are that the four suits represent the four seasons, the 13 cards per suit are the 13 phases of the lunar cycle, black and red are for day and night, the 52 cards of the deck (joker excluded) symbolizes the number of weeks in a year, and finally, if the value of each card is added up — and 1 is added, which is generally explained away as being for a single joker — the result is 365, the number of days in a year. The context for these stories is sometimes given to suggest that the interpretation is a joke, generally being the purported explanation given by someone caught with a deck of cards in order to suggest that their intended purpose was not gambling.


Playing Cards Today

The primary deck of fifty-two playing cards in use today, called Anglo-American playing cards, includes thirteen ranks of each of the four French suits, spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs, with reversible Rouennais court cards. Each suit includes an ace, depicting a single symbol of its suit; a king, queen, and jack, each depicted with a symbol of its suit; and ranks two through ten, with each card depicting that many symbols (pips) of its suit. Two (sometimes one or four) Jokers, often distinguishable with one being more colorful than the other, are included in commercial decks but many games require one or both to be removed before play. Modern playing cards carry index labels on opposite corners (rarely, all four corners) to facilitate identifying the cards when they overlap.

The fanciful design and manufacturer's logo commonly displayed on the Ace of Spades began under the reign of James I of England, who passed a law requiring an insignia on that card as proof of payment of a tax on local manufacture of cards. Until August 4, 1960, decks of playing cards printed and sold in the United Kingdom were liable for taxable duty and the Ace of Spades carried an indication of the name of the printer and the fact that taxation had been paid on the cards. The packs were also sealed with a government duty wrapper.

The most common sizes for playing cards are poker size (2½in × 3½in; 62 mm × 88 mm, or B8 size according to ISO 216) and bridge size (2¼in × 3½in, approx. 56 mm × 88 mm), the latter being more suitable for games such as bridge in which a large number of cards must be held concealed in a player's hand. Interestingly, in most casino poker games, the bridge sized card is used. Other sizes are also available, such as a smaller size (usually 1¾in × 2?in, approx. 44 mm × 66 mm) for solitaire and larger ones for card tricks.


Miniature Decks

A Miniature Deck is about half the size of a standard card deck, measuring 1.75 inches wide by 2.5 inches tall. Because of their small size, they are difficult to shuffle and generally only collected as a novelty item or used in card tricks such as the "Vanishing Card" routine.


Card Game

A card game is any game using playing cards, either traditional or game-specific.

The Deck or Pack

A card game is played with a deck (common in the US), or pack (common in the UK), of cards intended for that game. The deck consists of a fixed number of pieces of printed cardboard known as cards. The cards in a deck are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. The backs of the cards in a deck are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards in a deck may all be unique, or may include duplicates, depending on the game. In either case, any card is readily identifiable by its face. The set of cards that make up the deck are known to all of the players using that deck.

Although many games have special decks of cards, the 52 card pack is known as the standard deck, and is used in a wide variety of games. It consists of 52 cards, each card having a suit (one of spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs) and a rank (a number between 2 and 10, or one of jack, queen, king and ace). For any combination of one suit and one rank, there is exactly one card in the standard deck having that suit and rank. In addition to games that use the standard deck, there are also games that use some modification of the standard deck, for example excluding all cards of rank lower than some rank (e.g., a pinochle deck), or adding a special card, joker, to the standard deck. Many European regions have their own variants of the standard deck having different names and imagery for suits, or having a different set of ranks in the cards.

There are also some card games that require multiple standard decks. In this scenario, a "deck" refers to a set of 52 cards or a single deck, while a "pack" or "shoe" (Blackjack) refers to the collection of "decks" as a whole.



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