46 Fun Facts About Card Game

Playing cards were most likely invented in which country?

China. The usual story starts with a 'leaf game' at the Tang court in the 9th century, though it may not have used cards at all; the first firm record is of two gamblers caught with printed cards in 1294.

Cards probably reached Europe via which Egyptian dynasty's decks?

The Mamluks. Once their cards crossed the Mediterranean the craze moved fast: Europe's first mention comes from Spain in 1371, and by 1380 cards were being reported from Barcelona and Florence to Paris.

The playing-card suit name 'spades' probably comes from an Italian or Spanish word for what?

Swords. English players seem to have met the older Italian and Spanish packs first and kept their names when today's suit signs arrived around 1480, which is why a suit drawn as a pike-head is called spades.

The joker was added to American packs in the mid-19th century as a top trump for which game?

Euchre. Its highest cards are the two jacks of the trump colour, the bowers, so card makers printed a spare 'Best Bower' to beat them both; poker players only later took it up as a wild card.

Why does the ace of spades traditionally carry such an ornate design?

It bore the official tax stamp. From 1765 Britain's tax office printed every ace of spades itself to show duty had been paid, and forging one was a hanging offence; makers kept the fancy ace once they were free to design their own.

Which mathematics professor showed in his 1962 book Beat the Dealer that card counting could beat blackjack?

Edward Thorp. Having beaten blackjack, he and Claude Shannon built a hidden wearable computer to beat roulette, and he later took his probability methods to Wall Street as a hedge-fund manager.

The MIT Blackjack Team's exploits inspired which best-selling book by Ben Mezrich?

Bringing Down the House. Hollywood filmed it as 21, which opened at number one in 2008, even as the Boston Globe was questioning how much of the 'nonfiction' bestseller had really happened.

Modern contract bridge grew out of changes to auction bridge scoring devised by which yachting millionaire?

Harold Vanderbilt. The railway heir, who also skippered three winning America's Cup defences, set out his scoring in 1925, and by the end of the decade 'bridge' simply meant his version of the game.

Canasta was devised in 1939 in which city?

Montevideo. A lawyer and his bridge partner, an architect, are said to have devised it there; it crossed to Argentina and then the United States, where in the 1950s it briefly threatened to displace bridge.

Sir John Suckling is credited with turning the old game Noddy into which game?

Cribbage. His reputed addition, early in the 17th century, was the crib itself, a spare hand built from the players' discards that scores for the dealer; Noddy died out, while his version became Britain's national card game.

Solitaire card games for one player are traditionally known by what name in Britain?

Patience. The American word went global after 1990, when a computer version was bundled with Windows; older European names for the pastime hint that it may have begun as a way of telling fortunes.

In the US and Canada, the plain word 'Solitaire' usually refers to which specific game?

Klondike. The name is often put down to the gold rush of the 1890s, though nobody has proved it, and the game became the world's default one-player card game when Microsoft shipped a version with Windows in 1990.

Which solitaire game, bundled with Windows from 1995, came with 32,000 numbered deals, all but one solvable?

FreeCell. Paul Alfille wrote the first version in 1978 for a university computer network, and when more than a hundred internet volunteers later attacked every Windows deal, only number 11982 beat them all.

Which form of poker decides the Main Event of the World Series of Poker?

Texas hold 'em. Each player holds two private cards and shares five on the table; little is known about who invented it, but the Texas legislature has officially named the town of Robstown as its birthplace.

Who created Magic: The Gathering?

Richard Garfield. Then a mathematics doctoral student, he had gone to pitch a robot board game; the publisher thought it too costly and asked for something portable to play between convention sessions instead.

In standard poker with no wild cards, which hand beats all the others?

Royal flush. Ace, king, queen, jack and ten of one suit are simply the best possible straight flush; only when wild cards are added can anything beat it, namely five of a kind.

Which Magic: The Gathering card sold for a record $3 million in 2024?

Black Lotus. It costs nothing to play and hands its owner three mana at once, and with only about 1,100 printed in the game's first run in 1993, a pristine copy has become the ultimate trophy.

Who first published Pokémon cards in America?

Wizards of the Coast. The makers of Magic: The Gathering held the licence until 2003, when the Pokémon Company took the cards in-house; the game itself had been on sale in Japan since 1996.

Guinness World Records named which trading card game the world's top-selling in 2009, at over 22 billion cards?

Yu-Gi-Oh! The card duels started as one of many games in Kazuki Takahashi's manga, came to dominate its later story arcs, and were turned into a real game by Konami.

Cards Against Humanity began with a campaign on which platform in 2011?

Kickstarter. The makers have also given the game away since day one: anyone may download and print the cards free under a Creative Commons licence, and the boxed sets sell regardless.

Which card game passed its $10,000 crowdfunding goal within minutes in 2015, drawing record backers?

Exploding Kittens. Drawn by Matthew Inman of the webcomic The Oatmeal, the game of cats that blow up ended its month-long campaign with almost $8.8 million from more than 219,000 backers.

Which Mattel card game began in 1967 as a Texas woman's boxed version of Spite and Malice?

Skip-Bo. Its maker, Minnie Bowman of Brownfield, Texas, was known as Skip and put her nickname on the box; underneath, it is a race to empty a stock pile that descends from the old two-player game Russian Bank.

Crazy Eights belongs to a family of games that also includes Mau-Mau, Switch and which modern hit?

Uno. An Ohio barber, Merle Robbins, devised it in 1971, mortgaged his home to print the first 5,000 packs and sold them from his own shop, then sold the rights a year later for $50,000 and a royalty.

Punto banco, chemin de fer and banque are the three popular variants of which casino game?

Baccarat. In punto banco, the form most American casinos deal, the house banks every hand, while in chemin de fer, the high rollers' game James Bond made famous, the players take turns to be the bank.

Tarot cards were first made in Renaissance Italy for which games?

Trick-taking games. The Italian game of tarocchi added a run of picture cards as permanent trumps, and it was some 300 years before French occultists began claiming the pack held secret meanings.

Which video game giant began in 1889 making hanafuda cards?

Nintendo. Fusajiro Yamauchi started the firm in Kyoto to make the cards, and it has never stopped: alongside its consoles it still sells hanafuda today, including packs decorated with Mario.

Each of hanafuda's twelve suits stands for what?

A month. Each one is shown by its own plant, pine for January and cherry blossom for March among them, with four cards apiece, which is why the name means 'flower cards'.

The Cincinnati firm that became the United States Playing Card Company launched which famous brand of cards in 1885?

Bicycle. In the Second World War its makers worked with the US government on secret packs for prisoners of war: soaked in water, the cards peeled apart to reveal the pieces of an escape map.

In bridge, what is it called when one side bids and wins all thirteen tricks?

Grand slam. Twelve tricks is only a small slam; the phrase was card-table talk for a century before sport borrowed it, first for a sweep of the big titles and later for a bases-loaded home run.

The 'dead man's hand' of aces and eights is named for which Old West figure, reputedly shot holding it?

Wild Bill Hickok. He was shot dead at a poker table in Deadwood in 1876, but nobody at the time wrote down his cards; the aces-and-eights version was fixed by a biography published fifty years later.

How was the champion of the first World Series of Poker chosen in 1970?

By a vote of the players. After a session of cash games at Binion's Horseshoe, the invited professionals elected Johnny Moss the best among them and he went home with a silver cup; the knockout format only arrived a year later.

The 17th-century English card game Ruff and Honours evolved into which game, itself the parent of bridge?

Whist. It became the game of fashionable London, and the little rule book Edmond Hoyle wrote for it in 1742 sold so well that his name turned into a byword for playing by the rules.

The card game Spades first spread abroad through whom?

American troops. Devised in the United States in the 1930s, it makes one suit always trumps, hence the name; for decades it was barely known abroad except near places where US forces were stationed.

Which game's 48-card deck doubles every card from nine to ace?

Pinochle. German immigrants brought it to America in the 19th century under a name that English speakers apparently bent into pinochle; the game itself is an offshoot of the French game bezique.

Conquian, the game that gave rise to the whole rummy family in North America, comes from which country?

Mexico. It is first mentioned in Mexico City in 1857, crossed the border under the name 'coon can' and fathered the western rummy games; a rival theory traces the draw-and-discard idea to the Far East instead.

Which two-player card game became America's fad of the 1940s after Hollywood stars took it up?

Gin rummy. Tradition credits a Brooklyn card teacher, Elwood T. Baker, with devising it in 1909, but it stayed a New York game, often called gin poker, until the film colony's enthusiasm in 1941 made it a national craze.

When Black Peter, Germany's Old Maid, is played with a standard pack, which card is the odd one out?

Jack. Where the game has a man's name the odd card is a jack, and where it is Old Maid it is a queen; the French version, Vieux Garçon, is literally 'old boy', and whoever is left holding the card loses.

The standard 52-card deck used for bridge and poker belongs to which suit system?

French-suited. Its plain one-colour suit signs were simple to mass-produce, and the reach of France, Britain and the United States carried them round the world, leaving the older systems to their home regions.

Which playing card has been known since the early 18th century as 'the Curse of Scotland'?

Nine of diamonds. Nobody knows why: readers were already asking in 1708, and the rival explanations include the nine lozenges on the Earl of Stair's coat of arms and battle orders said to have been scribbled on the card.

Which giant in Rabelais's fiction plays a long list of card games that historians use as a record of 16th-century play?

Gargantua. A whole chapter of the 1534 novel simply lists his pastimes, flush, primero and trump among them; Rabelais explains none of them, yet the bare list is among the best records of what France was playing.

Which three-player game, devised in the town of Altenburg around 1810, is regarded as Germany's national card game?

Skat. Members of a local card club pieced it together from the older games they played, and every hand opens with an auction to decide which player will take on the other two alone.

The card players' word 'trump' began as a corruption of which word?

Triumph. A game called la triomphe was being played in France by the late 15th century, and English players clipped the name to 'trump', the word we still use for a suit that beats all the others.

Which Spanish game, hailed as 'the most successful card game ever invented' in its day, spawned Quadrille?

Ombre. The name is the Spanish for 'man', the title of the lone player who wins the bidding and takes on the other two, and the game was fashionable enough for Pope to stage a hand of it in The Rape of the Lock.

Which is the only fishing game widely played in English-speaking countries?

Scopa is one of Italy's national games, and Zwicker is a 'simpler and jollier' German cousin.

Card play traditionally passes clockwise in North America, but in which of these regions does it run counterclockwise?

Asia. Europe itself is split, clockwise in the north and west and counterclockwise in the south and east, which is why Italian and Spanish players deal and play to the right while their northern neighbours go to the left.

Karnöffel, Europe's oldest card game, was thought lost until the 1970s, when it was found still played in which country?

Switzerland. The game is first recorded in a Bavarian town by-law of 1426 and its rules had long since vanished from print; players in a few remote Swiss valleys had kept it going under another name, Kaiserspiel.