Playing card game

Whist is a classic trick-taking card game which was played widely in the 18th and 19th centuries. It developed from the older game Ruff and Honours. Although the rules are extremely simple, there is enormous scope for scientific play; since the only information known at the start is the player's thirteen cards, the game is difficult to play well. In its heyday a large amount of literature about how to play Whist was written. Edmond Hoyle, of "according to Hoyle" fame, wrote an early popular...

Pinochle (sometimes Pinocle or Penuchle), is a trick-taking game typically for two, three or four players and played with a 48 card deck. Derived from the card game Bezique, players score points by trick-taking and also by forming combinations of cards into melds. Each hand is played in three phases: bidding, melds, and tricks. A Pinochle deck consists of two copies of each of the 9, 10, jack, queen, king, and ace cards of all four suits. Aces are always considered high. Pinochle follows the...

Paskahousu (shitty pants) is a Finnish card game similar to Shithead. The object of the game is to play higher cards than the previously played cards, first to get replacement cards from the stock pile, and, after the stock pile has exhausted, to get rid of one's cards. Although the basic play is the same across rule variants, the details of the rules vary tremendously. It is practically impossible to find two identical descriptions of the game in the literature. See the Miscellaneous rule...

Minnesota whist is a simplified version of whist in which there are no trumps, and the goal of the game is to take 7 of the 13 tricks. Four-handed whist is played with two teams. The players of each team sit opposite each other at the table. One person is elected to keep score. Typically the scorer's team is labeled as "Us" and the other team labeled as "Them". In this game, the ace is high. This style of whist is sometimes referred to as Norwegian Whist as it has been passed forward to the...

Tuppi is a variant of Minnesota whist played in the Northern Finland. The major difference between Tuppi and Minnesota Whist is the scoring. In Tuppi, only one team can have points at a time, and consequently the points required to win a game must be collected in consecutive hands, without opponents scoring in between. Tuppi is not normally played for money, and formerly people played Tuppi when their economical situation did not allow them to play Sökö. Nowadays, there are Tuppi clubs in...

Pitch is a card game played with a standard 52-card pack of playing cards. It may be played by three players (cutthroat) or by four players organized in teams of two. Pitch involves bidding and trick-taking. Pitch may involve betting or gambling of any sort. A very similar variation on Pitch is High-Low Jack. One player deals each hand. The cards are dealt in 3-card batches to each player, such that the dealer distributes two sets of 3-card batches to each player. At the end of each hand, the...

Scopa is an Italian card game played with a standard Italian 40-card deck. It is most commonly played between two players or two teams of two players each, but can also be played with 3, 4, or 6 individual players. Scopa is a trick-taking game. The name is the Italian verb meaning "to sweep" since taking a "scopa" means you have "swept" all the cards from the pool. Scopa is also a slang term for sexual intercourse, this may be related since capturing a "scopa" scores you a full point. Watching...

Marjapussi (Bag of Berries) is a traditional Finnish trick taking game. The speciality of Marjapussi is that the trump suit is determined in the middle of the play by declaring a marriage (a king and a queen of a same suit). To win a game, a partnership must get exactly twelve points. A very similar game is played in Sweden under the name Bondtolva, meaning Farmer's Dozen. Later, Marjapussi evolved into Huutopussi (Shouting Bag), which involves bidding. The exact winning condition was dropped,...

Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game of skill and chance (the relative proportions depending on the variant played). It is played by four players who form two partnerships; the partners sit opposite each other at a table. The game consists of the auction (often called bidding) and play, after which the hand is scored. The bidding ends with a contract, which is a declaration by one partnership that their side will take at least a stated number of tricks,...

Écarté is a two-player card game originating from France, the word literally meaning "discarded". It is a trick-taking game, similar to Whist, but with a special and eponymous discarding phase. It is closely related to Euchre, a card game played mainly in the USA, and it seems likely that Écarté is the game from which Euchre was developed. Écarté was popular in the 19th century, but is now rarely played. All cards from two to six are removed from a 52-card pack, to produce the Piquet pack of...

All-Fours is a card game known in America as Old Sledge, or Seven Up. It is usually played by two players, althought there is a 4 player variant, with the full pack of fifty-two cards, which rank in play as at Whist, the ace being the highest, and the twothe lowest. The game is to seven points with two players and 14 points when played with four players. The game is very popular in Blackburn, in Lancashire, England, where it is traditionally played in pubs . Even at the present time it is...

Panguingue (also known as Pan) is a gambling card game similar to rummy. It used to be particularly popular in Las Vegas and other casino in the American southwest. Its popularity has been waning, and now is only found in one casino in Las Vegas (The Plaza Hotel,) and a handful of casinos in California. House games and online poker sites are other places where you can find the game still played. The game is played using a 320-card deck, constructed from eight decks of playing card, removing...

Bezique (in French, bézique) is a melding and trick-taking card game for two players. It was developed in France in the seventeenth century from the game piquet and gained its greatest popularity in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps the most famous proponent of the game was Winston Churchill, an avid player and early expert of Six-Pack, or "Chinese," Bezique. There is some evidence that the English writers Wilkie Collins and Christina Rossetti were also enthusiasts. Bezique was...

The cards are shuffled by the dealer and cut by the player to dealer's right. Cards can be dealt in ones but it is common practice to deal the cards in groups of three and then a single card for the last round (3,3,3,3,1). The last card is turned face up to indicate the trump suit for that game. The exposed card is part of the dealer's hand and he can pick it up once everyone has noted it. The turn to deal passes to the left after each hand. In some variations (see below) the cards are...

Primo visto (also spelled Primavista, Primiuiste, Primofistula) was a 16th-century card game. Very little is known about this game. Based upon references in period literature it appears to be closely related to the game Primero with some later authorities claiming that the two games were in fact the same. Evidence opposing this claim include the fact that the earliest known reference to the name primo visto was in 1591 (in Greene's "Notable Discovery of Coosnage"), more than 50 years after...