Card Game Trivia
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46 free Card Game trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free Card game trivia questions with answers. Card games are a thousand years old and still being invented, and this quiz shuffles the whole history. It starts with the deck itself: Tang dynasty woodblocks, the Mamluk decks that reached Spain, the French suits, why the joker exists and why the ace of spades is so ornate. Then the classics: Hoyle's whist, Vanderbilt's bridge, Montevideo's canasta, cribbage's noddy roots, Alsatian euchre, gin rummy, hearts, spades and pinochle. The modern era follows: Thorp's card counting and the MIT team, Wes Cherry's Windows Solitaire and FreeCell, Uno from a Cincinnati suburb, Richard Garfield's Magic and the half-million-dollar Black Lotus, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s billions of cards, Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens' eight-minute Kickstarter, Skip-Bo, Phase 10, hanafuda and the dead man's hand. Easy questions suit family game night; harder ones will test bridge clubs and TCG collectors. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the games, and the source line appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Playing cards were most likely invented in which country?
China
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.
Q 02Cards probably reached Europe via which Egyptian dynasty's decks?
The Mamluks
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.
Q 03The playing-card suit name 'spades' probably comes from an Italian or Spanish word for what?
Swords
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.
Q 04The joker was added to American packs in the mid-19th century as a top trump for which game?
Euchre
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.
Q 05Why does the ace of spades traditionally carry such an ornate design?
It bore the official tax stamp
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.
Q 06Which mathematics professor showed in his 1962 book Beat the Dealer that card counting could beat blackjack?
Edward Thorp
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.
Q 07The MIT Blackjack Team's exploits inspired which best-selling book by Ben Mezrich?
Bringing Down the House
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.
Q 08Modern contract bridge grew out of changes to auction bridge scoring devised by which yachting millionaire?
Harold Vanderbilt
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.
Q 09Canasta was devised in 1939 in which city?
Montevideo
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.
Q 10Sir John Suckling is credited with turning the old game Noddy into which game?
Cribbage
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.
Q 11Solitaire card games for one player are traditionally known by what name in Britain?
Patience
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.
Q 12In the US and Canada, the plain word 'Solitaire' usually refers to which specific game?
Klondike
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.
Q 13Which solitaire game, bundled with Windows from 1995, came with 32,000 numbered deals, all but one solvable?
FreeCell
Q 21Which card game passed its $10,000 crowdfunding goal within minutes in 2015, drawing record backers?
Exploding Kittens
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.
Q 22Which Mattel card game began in 1967 as a Texas woman's boxed version of Spite and Malice?
Skip-Bo
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.
Q 23Crazy Eights belongs to a family of games that also includes Mau-Mau, Switch and which modern hit?
Uno
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.
Q 14Which form of poker decides the Main Event of the World Series of Poker?
Texas hold 'em
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.
Q 15Who created Magic: The Gathering?
Richard Garfield
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.
Q 16In standard poker with no wild cards, which hand beats all the others?
Royal flush
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.
Q 17Which Magic: The Gathering card sold for a record $3 million in 2024?
Black Lotus
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.
Q 18Who first published Pokémon cards in America?
Wizards of the Coast
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.
Q 19Guinness World Records named which trading card game the world's top-selling in 2009, at over 22 billion cards?
Yu-Gi-Oh!
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.
Q 20Cards Against Humanity began with a campaign on which platform in 2011?
Kickstarter
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.
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.
Q 24Punto banco, chemin de fer and banque are the three popular variants of which casino game?
Baccarat
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.
Q 25Tarot cards were first made in Renaissance Italy for which games?
Trick-taking 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.
Q 26Which video game giant began in 1889 making hanafuda cards?
Nintendo
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.
Q 27Each of hanafuda's twelve suits stands for what?
A month
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'.
Q 28The Cincinnati firm that became the United States Playing Card Company launched which famous brand of cards in 1885?
Bicycle
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.
Q 29In bridge, what is it called when one side bids and wins all thirteen tricks?
Grand slam
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.
Q 30The 'dead man's hand' of aces and eights is named for which Old West figure, reputedly shot holding it?
Wild Bill Hickok
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.