Playing cards

A playing card is a typically hand-sized piece of heavy paper or thin plastic. A complete set of cards is a pack or deck. A deck of cards is used for playing one of many card games, some of which constitute gambling. more...

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Because they are both standard and commonly available, playing cards are often adapted for other uses, such as magic tricks, cartomancy, encryption, boardgames, or building a house of cards.

The front (or "face") of each card carries markings that distinguish it from the other cards and determine its use under the rules of the game being played. The back of each card is identical for all cards in any particular deck, and usually of a plain color or abstract design. The back of playing cards is often used for advertising. For most games, the cards are assembled into a deck, and their order is randomized by shuffling.

History

Early history

Playing cards emerged in 9th century China. Ancient Chinese "money cards" have four "suits": coins (or cash), strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), myriads of strings, and tens of myriads. These were represented by ideograms, with numerals of 2–9 in the first three suits and numerals 1–9 in the "tens of myriads". Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which were both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for. The designs on modern Mahjong tiles likely evolved from those earliest playing cards. However, it may be that the first deck of cards ever printed was a Chinese domino deck, in whose cards we can see all the 21 combinations of a pair of dice. In Kuei-t'ien-lu, a Chinese text redacted in the 11th century, we find that dominoes cards were printed during the T’ang dynasty, contemporary to the first books. The Chinese word pái (牌) is used to describe both paper cards and gaming tiles.

An Indian origin for playing cards has been suggested by the resemblance of symbols on some early European decks (traditional Sicilian cards, for example) to the ring, sword, cup, and baton classically depicted in the four hands of Indian statues.

The time and manner of the introduction of cards into Europe are matters of dispute. The 38th canon of the council of Worcester (1240) is often quoted as evidence of cards having been known in England in the middle of the 13th century, but the games de rege et regina (on the king and the queen) there mentioned are now thought to more likely have been chess.

Read more at Wikipedia.org