Playing Cards
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Playing Cards trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A deck of playing cards is one of the most familiar objects in the world and one of the strangest. Its pictures have been copied and miscopied for centuries, its suits changed shape as they crossed borders, and almost every card has picked up a nickname, a legend or a tax along the way. This quiz deals from the whole pack. Some questions cover how cards were invented and how they travelled, others the hidden details of the court cards, the suits used in other countries and the companies that print the decks. There are rounds on the games families actually play at the kitchen table, on wartime secrets and con tricks, and on the cards that turn up in paintings, comics, songs and children's books. It works as a quick solo challenge, a team round for a quiz night or something to argue over with the family after dinner. The early questions are friendly, the later ones are for people who know their way around a deck, and every answer comes with a short explanation worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which playing card earns a 'suicide' nickname because its figure seems to drive a sword into his own head?
King of hearts
The King of hearts looks doomed only by accident: centuries of sloppy copying by English card makers wiped out the head of the axe he once carried.
Q 02Which video game giant began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade hanafuda playing cards?
Nintendo
Nintendo was founded by the craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi, whose flower-patterned decks caught on after Japan banned most gambling in 1882 but tolerated hanafuda.
Q 03Microsoft's Solitaire, bundled with Windows from 1990, helped nervous new users practise which skill?
Using a mouse
Using a mouse was unfamiliar to many people in 1990, and dragging cards between piles taught drag-and-drop without feeling like a lesson. An intern, Wes Cherry, wrote the game.
Q 04In World War II, playing cards sent to Allied prisoners of war peeled apart when wet to reveal what?
Escape maps
Escape maps were hidden between the layers of decks that the United States Playing Card Company made in secret with the government for captured servicemen.
Q 05Poker's 'dead man's hand' of aces and eights is linked to which gunfighter, shot in Deadwood in 1876?
Wild Bill Hickok
Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind by Jack McCall during a game in a saloon, yet nobody linked the hand to him in print until the 1920s.
Q 06Which playing card has an ornate, oversized symbol because English makers once had to show tax paid on it?
Ace of spades
The Ace of spades carried the official duty stamp from 1712, and the tax on English decks was not scrapped until 1960.
Q 07Which country most likely invented playing cards in the 9th century, thanks to its early woodblock printing?
China
China has the oldest hints of card play, including an 868 account of a Tang princess playing a 'leaf game' that may have used printed cards.
Q 08The joker joined American packs of playing cards in the mid-1800s as an extra top trump for which game?
Euchre
Euchre players wanted a card to outrank both bowers, so makers added a 'best bower' that became the joker. Samuel Hart printed the first illustrated one in 1863.
Q 09Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's cigar-advert paintings show which animals gathered around a poker table?
Dogs
Dogs star in the whole series, including sixteen paintings ordered in 1903 by the firm Brown & Bigelow. The first, from 1894, sold for $658,000 in 2015.
Q 10Which leader was the highest ace in the US military's 2003 deck of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards?
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein topped the deck, with his sons Qusay and Uday on two more aces. Troops carried the cards to help them recognise wanted officials.
Q 11In the American version of the card game Hearts, which single card costs its taker 13 penalty points?
Queen of spades
The Queen of spades is nicknamed the Black Lady, and she only became a penalty card in 1909, decades after the game was first recorded.
Q 12In which children's card game do players ask a rival for cards of one rank and draw when refused?
Go Fish
Go Fish takes its name from the refusal itself: a player without the requested rank says 'Go fish!' and the asker has to draw a card instead.
Q 13Which unbeatable poker hand is made up of the ace, king, queen, jack and ten of a single suit?
Royal flush
A Royal flush is simply the highest possible straight flush, and it only loses its crown in games with wild cards, where five of a kind outranks it.
Q 21In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, playing-card gardeners are caught painting white roses which colour?
Red
Red was the colour the rose tree should have been: the gardeners had planted a white one by mistake and were covering it up before the Queen of Hearts noticed.
Q 22Tarot cards appeared in 15th-century Italy for which purpose, centuries before occultists took them up?
Trick-taking games
Trick-taking games such as Tarocchini were the whole point of tarot until the late 18th century, when French occultists made grand, unsupported claims about the cards' history.
Q 23What is the name for telling fortunes with playing cards, often done in France with a 32-card piquet pack?
Cartomancy
Q 14In the prank '52 pickup', what does the dealer do with the whole deck?
Throws it into the air
The prankster throws it into the air so the cards land strewn across the floor, then tells the victim to pick up all 52. It works best on eager younger children.
Q 15Which country star took the poker ballad The Gambler to number one after earlier recordings had flopped?
Kenny Rogers
Kenny Rogers won a Grammy for the song, which its writer Don Schlitz had hawked around Nashville for two years before anyone would record it.
Q 16Which Cajun X-Men mutant charges playing cards with kinetic energy and hurls them as explosives?
Gambit
Gambit, born Remy LeBeau, can charge almost any object he touches, and his backstory ties him to the Thieves' Guild of New Orleans.
Q 17Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer showed that card counting could beat the house at which casino game?
Blackjack
Blackjack fell to an IBM 704 computer: Thorp used it to work out the odds, then tested his counting system at tables in Reno and Lake Tahoe.
Q 18Which older name, still common in Britain, covers the one-player card games Americans call solitaire?
Patience
Patience is the earliest recorded name in both British and American sources, and it stuck because the games were seen as an exercise in exactly that.
Q 19Which brand of playing cards, launched in 1885, is best known for the 'Rider Back' design on its reverse?
Bicycle
Bicycle took its name from the cycling craze of the late 19th century, and the Rider Back is by far its most popular design.
Q 20Which shedding card game, a cousin of Uno, has a wild rank that lets its player name a new suit?
Crazy Eights
Crazy Eights began as plain Eights in the 1930s; the 'crazy' arrived in the 1940s, borrowed from Section 8, the US military discharge for mental instability.
Cartomancy with a standard deck was the most popular form of fortune-telling card reading throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Q 24The Japanese word for playing cards, 'karuta', comes from the language of which European nation?
Portugal
Portugal's traders brought cards to Japan in the mid-16th century, and their word 'carta' stuck as the name for every kind of deck made there since.
Q 25A Mamluk pack of playing cards found in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace has a suit of sticks from which sport?
Polo
Polo was an obscure sport to Europeans, so when they copied the Egyptian cards they redrew the unfamiliar sticks as batons or clubs.
Q 26German-suited playing cards use hearts, bells, leaves and which fourth symbol in place of the French clubs?
Acorns
Acorns are the German counterpart of clubs: around 1480 French card makers simplified the German symbols, probably to make mass production easier.
Q 27Spanish and Italian playing cards use swords, coins, batons and which fourth suit, also found in tarot?
Cups
Cups survive in fortune-telling tarot beside swords, wands and pentacles, the last two being the old batons and coins under new names.
Q 28French card makers traditionally labelled the king of diamonds with the name of which ancient Roman leader?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar shares the Paris pattern's thrones with David, Charlemagne and Alexander the Great; English cards, copied from a different French pattern, carry no names.
Q 29On French playing cards of the Paris pattern, the jack of clubs is named after which Arthurian hero?
Lancelot
Lancelot stands alongside Hector, the French soldier La Hire and Ogier the Dane, the names printed on the other three jacks.
Q 30What were jacks called in English playing cards before 'Kn' proved too easy to confuse with 'K'?
Knaves
Knaves, a word that once just meant boys or young men, lost out after the American maker Samuel Hart printed a J on his cards in 1864; 'jack' had been thought a low-class name.