International Playing-Card Society

Last updated

The International Playing-Card Society (IPCS) is a non-profit organisation for those interested in playing cards, their design, and their history. While many of its members are collectors of playing cards, they also include historians of playing cards and their uses, particularly card games and their history. [1]

Contents

The IPCS is based in the United Kingdom, but has members worldwide, especially in Europe.

It produces a quarterly journal The Playing-Card , which publishes articles mostly in English but also in French, German, Italian and Spanish. It also publishes occasional monographs called "IPCS Papers", and issues pattern sheets which systematize types of standard playing-card design. [2]

History

The IPCS was founded in 1972, as The Playing-Card Society, with a journal titled The Journal of the Playing-Card Society. In May 1980 the names of the society and the journal were changed, becoming The International Playing-Card Society and The Playing-Card. A newsletter, which became known as Playing-Card World, was formerly published as a supplement to the journal, running for 80 issues from 1975 to 1995.

Notable members

Notable members of the Society are or have included:

Related Research Articles

Playing card Card used for playing many card games

A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a finish to make handling easier. They are most commonly used for playing card games, and are also used in magic tricks, cardistry, card throwing, and card houses; cards may also be collected. Some patterns of Tarot playing card are also used for divination, although bespoke cards for this use are more common. Playing cards are typically palm-sized for convenient handling, and usually are sold together in a set as a deck of cards or pack of cards.

Tarot Cards used for games or divination

The tarot is a pack of playing cards, used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play games such as Italian tarocchini, French tarot and Austrian Königrufen, many of which are still played today. In the late 18th century, some tarot decks began to be used for divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy leading to custom decks developed for such occult purposes.

Michael Dummett

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (1925–2011) was an English academic described as "among the most significant British philosophers of the last century and a leading campaigner for racial tolerance and equality." He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. He wrote on the history of analytic philosophy, notably as an interpreter of Frege, and made original contributions particularly in the philosophies of mathematics, logic, language and metaphysics. He was known for his work on truth and meaning and their implications to debates between realism and anti-realism, a term he helped to popularize. He devised the Quota Borda system of proportional voting, based on the Borda count. In mathematical logic, he developed an intermediate logic, already studied by Kurt Gödel: the Gödel–Dummett logic.

King (playing card) Playing card

The king is a playing card with a picture of a king displayed on it. The king is usually the highest-ranking face card. In the French version of playing cards and tarot decks, the king immediately outranks the queen. In Italian and Spanish playing cards, the king immediately outranks the knight. In German and Swiss playing cards, the king immediately outranks the Ober. In some games, the king is the highest-ranked card; in others, the ace is higher. Aces began outranking kings around 1500 with Trappola being the earliest known game in which the aces were highest in all four suits. In the Ace-Ten family of games such as pinochle and schnapsen, both the ace and the 10 rank higher than the king.

Tarot of Marseilles

The Tarot of Marseilles or Tarot of Marseille, also widely known by the French designation Tarot de Marseille, is one of the standard patterns for the design of tarot cards. It is a pattern from which many subsequent tarot decks derive.

Tarot card reading Using tarot cards to perform divination

Tarot card reading is the practice of using tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by formulating a question, then drawing and interpreting cards. Reading tarot cards is a type of cartomancy. A regular tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the major arcana and minor arcana.

Trappola

Trappola is an early 16th-century Venetian trick-taking card game which spread to most parts of Central Europe and survived, in various forms and under various names like Trapulka, Bulka and Hundertspiel until perhaps the middle of the 20th century. It was played with a special pack of Italian-suited cards and last reported to have been manufactured in Prague in 1944. Piatnik has reprinted their old Trappola deck for collectors.

The Playing-Card is a quarterly publication, publishing scholarly articles covering all aspects of playing cards and of the games played with them, produced by the International Playing-Card Society.

German-suited playing cards

German-suited playing cards are a style of playing card used in many parts of Central Europe characterised by 32- or 36-card packs with the suits of Acorns (Eichel), Leaves, Hearts and Bells.

Tarot card games

Tarot games are card games played with tarot decks, that is, decks with numbered permanent trumps parallel to the suit cards. The games and decks which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot are called Tarocchi in the original Italian, Tarock in German and various similar words in other languages. The basic rules first appeared in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona, written before 1425. The games are known in many variations, mostly cultural and regional.

Tarocco Siciliano

The Tarocco Siciliano is a tarot deck found in Sicily and is used to play Sicilian tarocchi. It is one of the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks still used for games in Italy, the others being the more prevalent Tarocco Piemontese and the Tarocco Bolognese. The deck was heavily influenced by the Tarocco Bolognese and the Minchiate. It is also the only surviving tarot deck to use the Portuguese variation of the Latin suits of cups, coins, swords, and clubs which died out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

French-suited playing cards

French-suited playing cards or French-suited cards are cards that use the French suits of trèfles, carreaux, cœurs, and piques. Each suit contains three face cards: the valet, the dame, and the roi (king). Aside from these aspects, decks can include a wide variety of regional and national patterns, which often have different deck sizes. In comparison to Spanish, Italian, German, and Swiss playing cards, French cards are the most widespread due to the geopolitical, commercial, and cultural influence of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other reasons for their popularity were the simplicity of the suit insignia, which simplifies mass production, and the popularity of whist and contract bridge. The English pattern of French-suited cards is so widespread that it is often also known as the International or Anglo-American pattern.

<i>Industrie und Glück</i>

Industrie und Glück is a pattern of French suited playing cards used to play tarock. The name originates from an inscription found on the second trump card. This deck was developed during the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The earliest known examples were made in Vienna in 1815. After the collapse of the empire in World War I, it remained the most widely used tarot deck in Central Europe and can be found throughout the former parts of the empire.

Tapp Tarock

Tapp Tarock, also called Viennese Tappen, Tappen or Tapper, is a three-player tarot card game which traditionally uses the 54-card Industrie und Glück deck. Before the Anschluss (1938), it was the preferred card game of Viennese coffee houses, for example, the Literatencafés and Café Central. Even today Tapp Tarock is played sporadically. The exact date when it appeared is not possible to identify; some sources suggest it may have been developed in Austria in the early 19th century, but its mention in caricature operas in 1800 and 1806 suggest it was well known even by then and must have arisen in the late 18th century. The oldest description of the actual rules is dated to 1821. Tapp Tarock is considered a good entry level game before players attempt more complex Tarock forms like Cego, Illustrated Tarock or Königrufen.

Droggn

Droggn, sometimes called French Tarock is an extinct card game from the Austrian branch of the Tarock family for three players that was played in the Stubai valley in Tyrol, Austria until the 1980s. Droggn is originally local dialect for "to play Tarock", but it has become the proper name of this specific Tarock variant. An unusual feature of the game compared with other Tarock games is the use of a 66-card deck and that there is no record in the literature of a 66-card game and no current manufacturers of a such a deck. The structure of the game strongly indicates that it is descended from the later version of Tarok l'Hombre, a 78-card Tarock game popular in 19th-century Austria and Germany, but with the subsequent addition of two higher bids.

Blank (playing card)

A blank is a playing card in card-point games that is a non-counter, or is worth nothing. In Poker, the term refers to a community card which is extremely unlikely to help any remaining player.

Grosstarock, originally German Taroc or just Taroc, is an old three-handed card game of the Tarock family played with a full 78-card Tarot pack. It was probably introduced into the southern German states around 1720 but spread rapidly into Austria and northwards as far as the Netherlands and Scandinavia. It only survives today in Denmark where it is called Tarok, but is also referred to in English as Danish Tarok or Danish Tarock.

Bräus Old Swedish card game from the island of Gotland

Bräus is an old Swedish card game from the island of Gotland that differs from all others in that not all cards are actually playable. The game is descended from the oldest known card game in Europe, Karnöffel, a fact testified by its unusual card ranking and lack of a uniform trump suit.

John McLeod is a British mathematician, author, historian and card game researcher who is particularly well known for his work on tarot games as well as his reference website pagat.com which contains the rules for over 500 card games worldwide. He is described as a "prominent member" of the International Playing Card Society.

Thierry Depaulis is an independent historian of games and especially of playing cards, card games, and board games. He is President of the International Playing-Card Society, President of the association Le Vieux Papier, a member of the editorial board of the International Board Game Studies Association, and a member of the board of directors of the foundation of the Swiss Museum of Games.

References

  1. Parlett, David (2008). The Penguin Book of Card Games. Penguin. p. xi. ISBN   978-0-141-03787-5.
  2. Dummett, Michael (1980). The Game of Tarot. Duckworth. pp. 411–412. ISBN   0-7156-1014-7.