We don't, or at least I have never tried it, but we have different card games for various types of cards, and we play these games more often than 'normal' card games. We also still have French playing cards for games like poker, blackjack, solitaire, and others, but they're just not our main type of cards.
Tarot (/ˈtæroʊ/, first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarocks) is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, tarot-playing cards spread to most of Europe, evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and modern games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen. In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Thus, there are two distinct types of tarot packs in circulation: those used for card games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are occasionally used for cartomancy.
Huh. That explains why in Portugal hearts is called "copas". Also in Portugal diamonds are called "gold". The design is the French one, but the names stayed the original ones.
All these designs have the same origin in tarot cards, they just evolved slightly differently.
I heard about this, and I was excited to pick up a different style when I went to Germany. I got there, and all of the cards used the standard, international suits. No one knew what I was talking about.
The German suite is most common in east Germany. west Germans use the french deck, or if they're playing German card games they use the tournament German deck (which is just the french deck with different colours)
Not just any colours but the ones of the German deck: Diamonds are orange because bells are orange, and spades are green because leaves are green. Also spades and leaves look almost identical anyway. Hearts are the same, and acorns become clubs.
And just to be pedantic: It's not the "tournament deck", it's specifically the tournament deck for Skat, adopted when the East and German leagues reunified to avoid confusion. You'll be hard-pressed to get your hands on a 6 or below in those colours because Skat uses 32 cards.
Geographical east, not political East though, Bavaria very heavily uses the German deck. You don’t play Bavarian Schafkopf with a french deck. That’s just weird. I personally also find it weird to play mau mau or Schnautz (Schwimmen) with a French Deck. Doesn’t mean though, that we don’t use the French deck. You don’t play poker or rummy or cribbage for example with German cards. That’s equally as weird.
Huh? The German deck is also known as bavarian cards and they are very common in most of the German South. I'm from swabia and here you use different cards for different games.
Can you even play Schafskopf with the French deck??
The standard cards are everywhere, but the German variant is still used, at least in bavaria. Just talk with some grandpas in the village restaurants and they will gleefully get their cards out.
The second one is rarer but you can see it on the "Tarot de Marseille"
It's a different set of cards, in this form there called "lames" (blades) or "arcanes" (arcana)
The set is divided in 4 colors also called family: "épée" (sword), "coupe" (cup, but think of it as the same type of cup as the saint grail), "bâton" (club) and "denier" (it's an old coin)
This compose the 52 "arcanes mineurs"
In addition there also 22 "arcanes majeurs" called "atouts"
And it is usually recognize because it's the base of the Tarot use for divination
But now it's generally used to play the eponymous game of "Tarot", a very good and very old game that me and my friend played a lot at uni
Yes but also not only, we have MANY more design of tarot card, especially when considering "atouts/arcanes majeurs" as here a deck of tarot is an object of play but also an object of collection
This surprised me when I was younger. Heart, diamond, spade, and club seemed so foreign to me. For the record, in Spain we call them copas (cups), oros (coins (literally golds)), bastos (clubs), and espadas (swords).
Also, the pictures used in the map are not the most commonly used ones here. this (top row) is what most cards use
I don't think so. The other variants of the Spanish-inspired cards are clearly staves. Besides, basto is very, very close to bastón, the word for a staff like a walking stick. Gherkins are called pepinillos
Funny enough, in Portuguese, the names for the sets are dirty direct translations of the Spanish versions, but applied to the French icons. It didn’t make much sense to me calling a losange “golds”, or a heart “cups”, a leaf “swords”, and a clover leaf “sticks”.
Somehow this is the first time I've realized the symbols don't match their names at all. Not really sure what's dirty about them but it's actually pretty handy to have all suits be called the same names in French and Spanish suits since both are widely used around here in Southern Brazil.
Not the previous poster but I think the "dirty translation" is because in Portugal some things weren't translated at all (we use the actual word "copas" even though it's not a Portuguese word) and others are translated differently (were the Spanish use "bastos" - clubs - we use "paus" - sticks).
The French symbols are either pure black or pure red, they're symmetrical, and they're fairly abstract. The "diamond" is just a rhombus. The Spade and Club are fairly abstract shapes that don't look like anything in particular.
In the image, all the other versions are multicolored, and still seem to represent real-world objects. But, I'm curious if there are "modern" decks where say the coin (oro) is just a circle, or the club is just a long thin rectangle, or something.
Not sure if it is the same as Mexico, but the “oros bastos” set doesn’t have cards 8,9,10 but jump from 7 to sota (fancy lad or something like that), caballo (horse) and Rey (king).
YUROP
Heiß