The History of Playing Cards

When it comes to games, there’s nothing quite so ubiquitous nor so versatile as a deck of playing cards.

Depending on how you count, there are thousands of different games that can be played with a standard deck. (If you’re keen to add to your repertoire, here’s a site that lists more than 100!)

Mr Blackwell and I are regular players of a two-person Canasta variant that we largely made up to suit our needs, and I hold a bucket list goal of someday becoming a Bridge Master - spending my retirement years aboard cruise ships playing fierce games.

On a recent journey into the rabbit hole that is the internet I started to look at the history of playing cards in general.

Nobody really knows where they started…

When you start reading up on the history of playing cards, the first thing you notice is that no one is really sure exactly when or where they came from. Current scholarship suggests that card games and playing cards probably originated in Asia, with references to the “leaf” game in China, which could have been played with paper cards, as far back as the Tang Dynasty around the 9th century CE. But some sources suggest the leaf game could have been played with pages from books, or even paper currency instead of special cards.

By the 11th century, playing cards made their way across the world and into Egypt. The oldest known surviving playing cards date from the 12th and 13th centuries from this region. And this is when we know that the decks had four suits and 52 cards from more complete, later specimens. 

Interestingly, the first records of playing cards in Europe date to the 1360s and 70s, in mentions of banning card games by the cities of Bern and Florence. In fact, many of the earliest references to playing cards in Europe come from sermons and religious texts condemning their use for gambling. 

The earliest cards were made by hand, often with woodcut prints, and hand-painted, making them luxury items only for the elite - the same thing I found when looking into the History of Jigsaw Puzzles. An account book entry from 1379 records paying, “four peters and two florins, worth eight and a half sheep, for the purchase of packs of cards." It’s likely, too, that handmade cards were used by common people, though they wouldn’t have been as artful as those worth eight and a half sheep. 

In 1698, the “Mistery of Makers of Playing Cards of the City of London” was incorporated under a royal charter and awarded livery status, and they still exist today.

Advances in printing made card decks easier to mass produce and brought down the price beginning in the 1800s, bringing decks to the masses. 

The evolution of the suits

The earliest known cards in Asia had suits of different denominations or combinations of coins. Middle Eastern decks from the 12th and 13th centuries had four suits: polo-sticks, coins, swords, and cups, which are still used in what are known as Latin decks. As polo was a then-obscure sport in Europe, many European decks changed the polo-sticks to batons or cudgels. 

As the cards spread across Europe to the Germanic countries, the suits were changed to leaves or shields, hearts or roses, bells, and acorns. Later, a blending of Latin and Germanic suits resulted in the French suits of trèfles (clovers), carreaux (tiles), cœurs (hearts), and piques (pikes) by around 1480 which reflect the four suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, respectively) that we know today.

It was also around this time that Europeans changed the “court” cards to reflect European royalty, including kings, queens (sporadically), knights, and knaves (or princes). 

Playing card designs

It wasn’t until around 1700 that card makers first invented corner indices — that is, the number of the card printed in the corners — to make it easier for card players to hold all their cards together in one hand, but it wouldn’t be until the mid 1800s when an American card manufacturing company popularised the design. And it wasn’t until the late 18th century that the reversible court characters (a king with a head at each end of the card, for example) were widely in use.

Early card players preferred decks with blank backs, but visible wear and tear or writing on the backs could encourage cheating, so patterned decks with art, designs, and even advertising were developed.   

Sharp corners wear out quickly, and could reveal the value of a card, so they were replaced with the rounded corners we are so familiar with now.

And card makers in the United States were the first to introduce the Joker card for the game of Euchre, which became popular after the American Revolution. The earliest reference to the Joker as a wild card in poker is from 1875.

Today, the 52-card deck is the most popular, but other variations with different numbers of cards or different suits are regionally popular for different types of games.

The wonderful world of playing card designs

While the suit sides of the cards are somewhat consistent (though, there are beautiful variations to be found) the backs of cards offer a wild and wonderful blank canvas for designers.

Casinos and other gambling establishments often have their own cards designed and manufactured, to prevent cheating, and sometimes sell used cards as souvenirs, usually with a hole punched through them as another guard against cheats. 

Cards have been printed with fine art, such as the 1976 JPL Gallery’s commemoration of modern British artists, and low art as in the cards printed with naked women that have been popular since the days of miners and cowboys in America’s old west. Governments and police departments around the world have made cards with photos of the victims of cold cases or missing persons to draw attention to the crimes. And the Monuments Men Foundation has commissioned a set of cards with 52 of the most important works of art stolen during WWII in the hopes that someone will see and recognise one of the missing masterpieces. 

We have a variety of pop culture-inspired playing card decks both online and in our store. They make a perfect gift for someone you hope to spend more time with, playing any number of card games and pleasantly whiling away the hours.