Nobody knows who dealt the first hand. What we do know is that playing cards took about five hundred years to cross from China to Western Europe, and that almost every feature of the pack in your drawer, from the four suits to the tiny numbers in the corners, was added somewhere along the way.
China: paper, printing and a disputed “leaf game”
Playing cards need two things: cheap paper and a way to print on it. China had both long before anyone else, and most historians place the first cards there. The International Playing-Card Society puts it carefully: literary evidence suggests cards existed in China before the year 1000.
You will often read that cards were invented in 868, when a Tang princess played something called the “leaf game”. Treat that with care. Some scholars think the leaf game was really a dice or board game whose rules were written on the leaves, the pages, of a book. The first clear evidence is a legal case from 1294, in which two gamblers in Shandong were arrested with paper cards and the woodblocks used to print them.
Early Chinese cards included “money cards”, whose suits were coins, strings of coins and larger multiples of coins. Money on the table, in more than one sense.
Egypt: cups, coins, swords and polo sticks
How cards travelled west is not documented; the usual story runs through Persia and India to the Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria. Fragments of Mamluk cards survive, and one of them has been tentatively dated to the 12th or 13th century.
In 1939 the scholar L. A. Mayer identified a near-complete Mamluk pack in the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul. It dates from the 15th century and originally had 52 cards: four suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, each with ten number cards and three court cards. The courts show no people at all. Instead they carry titles in calligraphy: the king, the deputy king and the second deputy.
That word “deputy”, nā’ib in Arabic, gave Europe its first names for cards: naibi in Italian and naipes in Spanish, a word still used in Spain today.
Europe, 1370s: the cards arrive
Cards seem to reach Europe around 1370. A Paris ordinance of 1369 lists forbidden games but has no cards in it; within ten years they are everywhere. The Catalan word naip appears in a rhyming dictionary of 1371. On 23 March 1377, Florence banned “a certain game called naibbe, which has recently been introduced into these parts”. The same year, a Dominican friar, Johannes of Rheinfelden, wrote that “a certain game, called the game of cards, has reached us in the present year”, and described a pack of four suits with 13 cards each.
By 1380, cards are reliably reported in Florence, Basel, Regensburg, Brabant, Paris and Barcelona. Amsterdam allowed card playing in a charter of 1395; Leiden banned it two years later.
Banned within a year. A good sign.
Europeans could not make sense of polo, a game they did not know, so the polo sticks straightened into batons. Spanish and Italian cards still use these Latin suits: swords, batons, cups and coins. German makers experimented freely and settled on hearts, bells, acorns and leaves, with no queen at all; the Swiss chose shields, acorns, bells and roses. You can still buy all of them.
France: four simple shapes
Around 1470 to 1480, French card makers simplified the German suits into the four we know: cœurs (hearts), carreaux (diamonds, literally tiles), trèfles (clubs, literally clover) and piques (spades, literally pikes). The reason was practical. Flat red and black shapes could be applied with a simple stencil instead of a carved woodblock, which made the forty number cards in a pack fast and cheap to produce. Only the court cards needed careful printing.
Rouen and Lyon became export centres, and England imported its cards from Rouen. The English pattern you find in every standard pack today descends from the Rouen design.
French court cards traditionally carried names: in the Paris pattern the kings are David, Charles, Caesar and Alexander. They are heroic types, not portraits, and English and international packs have never carried names at all. Stories that a queen is really Elizabeth I are myths; the designs are older than she is.
Taxes, a famous ace, and tarot
Governments soon noticed that cards could be taxed. In England a formal duty on playing cards ran from 1711 until 1960. From 1765 the ace of spades had to be bought from the Stamp Office, which printed it as proof that the duty was paid, and forging it was a capital crime. When the duty moved to the wrapper in 1862, makers were free to design their own aces, and many kept the ornate ace of spades as their signature card. That is why it is still the fancy one.
Tarot, meanwhile, began in Italy in the early 15th century as a card game with an extra suit of trumps. The earliest dated reference to these trionfi cards is from Florence in 1440, and the famous hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards were made in Milan around 1450. For over three hundred years nobody read fortunes with them. That idea only appeared in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed tarot held the wisdom of ancient Egypt; most of his claims were later shown to be wrong. Tarot card games are still played in France, Austria, Italy and elsewhere.
The modern pack takes shape
Most of what makes a pack comfortable to hold arrived surprisingly late:
- Double-ended court cards appeared in continental Europe in the 18th century, so you could not tell from how someone held their cards that they had a king. English makers took them up in the mid-1800s.
- Corner indices, the small rank and suit in the corner, were first patented in the United States in 1864. They let you hold a whole hand in a tight fan and still read it.
- Rounded corners became common around 1880, simply because square corners bent.
- The joker was invented by American Euchre players in the 1860s as an extra top trump, the “best bower”. It reached English packs around 1880.
In Cincinnati, a printing firm run by A. O. Russell and Robert J. Morgan produced its first pack in 1881 and launched the Bicycle brand in 1885. The company became the United States Playing Card Company in 1894, and Bicycle is still the pack many people picture when they think of cards.
A few games that changed everything
Edmond Hoyle published his short treatise on Whist in 1742, and “according to Hoyle” still means “by the rules”. Poker grew up in the early 19th century around New Orleans, first with only 20 cards. Contract bridge got its modern scoring in 1925 from Harold Vanderbilt, on a cruise. And in 1990, Microsoft Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0, partly to teach people how to use a mouse. It has likely been installed on more than a billion computers.
Around the world today
The French-suited 52-card pack has spread almost everywhere, but it has not replaced everything. Spain uses its own Spanish-suited pack of 40 or 48 cards. Italy has sixteen regional patterns. German-suited cards are everyday in Bavaria and Austria, and the Swiss play Jass with shields and roses. In Japan, cards brought by Portuguese traders in the 16th century led to hanafuda, 48 flower cards in twelve months; a Kyoto company started making them in 1889. It was called Nintendo.
And in the Netherlands, the café table belongs to Klaverjassen, played with just 32 cards, where the jack of trumps outranks everything.
Next time someone says it’s just a deck of cards…