Parts of Swiss German speaking Switzerland have their own deck of playing cards referred to as Swiss-suited playing cards or Swiss-suited cards. They are mostly used for Jass, the "national card game" of Switzerland. The deck is related to the various German playing cards. Within Switzerland, these decks are called German or Swiss German cards.
Distribution of the Swiss deck is roughly east of the Brünig-Napf-Reuss line, in Schaffhausen, St. Gallen (and in adjacent Liechtenstein), Appenzell, Thurgau, Glarus, Zürich, all of Central Switzerland and the eastern part of Aargau.
The suits are as follows:
Bells Schellen ![]() | Shields Schilten ![]() | Roses Rosen ![]() | Acorns Eicheln ![]() |
The most common deck has 36 cards, nine of each suit. The card values are, in ascending order,
For the purposes of Jass, the numbered cards (six to nine) have no point value, the banner has a value of ten points, the picture-cards Under, Ober, König have values of two, three and four points, respectively, and the As has eleven points. The reduction to 36 cards (eliminating card values two to five) and the use of a male Ober instead of the "Queen" (perhaps related to the "Knight") is not unique to the Swiss deck but also found in a variety of German decks. Both "acorn" and "bells" are suits also found in German decks, while "shields" and "roses" seem to be unique to Switzerland.
A less common deck is the 48 card set containing the 3s, 4s, and 5s and is used to play the Karnöffel variant Kaiserspiel.
The Under corresponds to the Jack or Knave. The Under of trumps becoming the highest card in the game can be traced to the 15th-century game Karnöffel. The face cards in the 1920s Müller design show twelve individual characters, which have remained unchanged since. The sequence Under, Ober, König depicts social stratification, the Under characters are working class, depicted as a fool or jester (Schellen), a messenger or scribe (Schilten), a peasant (Rosen) and a soldier or page/servant, while the Ober characters are shown as clerks or overseers/officers, while the kings are crowned monarchs (three of them seated, the king of Rosen is shown standing). The four Under characters hold their suit symbol facing downward, the Ober and König characters hold it facing upward (with the exception of Eicheln Ober and Schilten König, whose suit symbols are hovering in the top left corner without their holding it as they are holding a pipe and a cup instead, respectively).
Five characters are shown as smoking. All but three characters are shown with "blonde" (yellow) hair, the exceptions being Schilten Under, Schellen Ober (both with "grey" hair) and Schellen Under (hair not visible due to his fool's cap).
Schellen | Schilten | Rosen | Eicheln | |
Under | A "fool" character facing the viewer, smoking a pipe. Schellen-Under also came to be used as a term for a "cripple", or for scary Fasnacht characters in Lucerne dialect. [1] | Left profile, a messenger wearing a tasseled cap and holding an envelope, with a quill pen tucked behind his ear | Left profile, smoking a pipe, wearing a tasseled cap | Left semi-profile, wearing a beret cap |
Ober | Left profile, wearing a tasseled cap, smoking a pipe | Left profile, the only bare-headed character, wearing a cloak and smoking a cigarillo or cigarette | Left profile, tasseled cap | Right semi-profile, tasseled cap, holding his pipe in his hand while exhaling smoke |
König | Left semi-profile, forked beard | Left semi-profile, beardless, holding a cup | Left semi-profile, beardless | Left semi-profile, long beard |
The earliest references for playing cards in Switzerland date back to the late 1370s when they were sweeping through Western Europe. In 1377, the Dominican friar John of Rheinfelden wrote the earliest description of playing cards in Europe. He described the most common deck as consisting of four suits each with 13 ranks with the top three depicting a seated king, an upper-marshal who holds his suit symbol up, and an under-marshal who held it down which corresponds to the current court cards. Aces must have disappeared very early since there are no surviving aces with Swiss suit marks. It was far easier to print a 48-card deck with two woodblocks than one with 52 cards. The Deuce was promoted above the king around the late 15th-century to become the new ace. The current suit-system emerged during the 15th-century around the same time as the German suit-system after much experimentation such as feathers and hats instead of acorns and roses. Unlike the Germans, the Swiss have maintained the Banner 10 after the mid-16th century. During the 17-century, ranks 3 to 5 disappeared from most decks save for those used to play Kaiserspiel. [2]
Basel was an early center for manufacturing packs. Two identical decks from around 1530 were independently discovered in 1998 and 2011. [3] This predecessor went through various stages of evolution during the following centuries. Johannes I Müller of Diessenhofen printed an early such deck in 1840. His successor Johannes II Müller was the owner of the Müller company in Schaffhausen which printed a "single image" variant of the deck in c. 1880, from which it derived the "double image" design which is now standard in c. 1920.
Since the introduction of this deck, the various manufacturers of this deck can only be distinguished in minor design details, and in some cases by the company name printed on the aces of Schellen and Schilten. In this design, a central rectangle on the aces of Schellen and Schilten were used for the text "Schaffhausen & Hasle" (the location of the presses) and "Spielkartenfabrik", respectively. [4] Also in the 1920s, a nearly identical design was produced by Hächler und Söhne of Zürich, indicated as "HASO" on the ace of Schellen. In designs derived from the 1920s Schaffhausen one, the ace of Schellen is still used to attribute the design to the original design, while the ace of Schilten is used to indicate the present manufacturer. The "single image" version survived into the 1950s, but became increasingly rare after 1920.
From the 1930s onward, the number of manufacturers increased. There was Walter Scharff Co. ("WASCO", Ennetbaden), 1930; [5] "Bernina, Dauer-Jasskarten" (Otto Hauser-Steiger, 1939-1946), and others. The Swiss discounter Migros began selling playing cards in the 1940s. Their cards were only identified by an image of a crossbow on the ace of Schellen. Since they are otherwise identical to the Hächler Söhne ones, it is likely that this company produced for Migros.
More recently, cards were produced by Fotorotar (1985), Grolimund (Coloroffset R. Grolimund, Bern. M. Rhyn, Laupen), SwissCard (Toffen near Berne, 1997), Carlit (Carlit + Ravensburger AG, Würenlos, 2000s), Grob Druck AG (Amriswil, "www.jasskarten.com"), among others. Swiss AGMüller, the company continuing the original "J. Müller Cie" which came up with the 1920s design, was acquired by Belgian company Cartamundi in 1999. A number of German producers also made Swiss German decks for the Swiss market (Berliner Spielkarten, Nürnberger Spielkarten, VASS Leinfelden), as did the Italian company Dal Negro of Treviso.
There have repeatedly been novelty designs of the traditional deck, but all of these were short-lived, and intended as humorous or designed for a special purpose. There have been "feminist" designs which show all the face cards as women (Frauezogg, designs by Elsi Jegen and Susan Csomor), and there have been numerous novelty decks made for marketing purposes where certain cards had an altered design showing a logo or mascot of the company in question; an early "special edition" of the Swiss deck was a "military" version printed in 1915 on the occasion of the World War I mobilization; the suits became "cavalry, artillery, infantry, engineers". Swiss cartoonist Fredy Sigg designed a "cartoon" variant of the deck in 1978. In the 2000s, Austrian and German card producers also came up with "face-lifted", modernized designs for the Swiss deck, but these were not widely sold in Switzerland. AG Müller since its acquisition by Cartamundi in 2000 also came up with various "modernized" variants, sold under the name "Jass Plus". "Playing Cards R Us, Inc" of Orlando, Florida produced a "non-smoking" deck with 52 cards and two Jokers (copied from the Csomor's feminist deck) in a very limited run of 50 decks in 2006. Since 2007, AG Müller has been selling Swiss suited poker sets with 52 cards plus three Jokers. [6] These cards are wider than Jass ones and the pip cards are different; roses and acorns are no longer connected by vines and the shields are uniformly the same. They also use English corner indices for the face cards which meant giving the Queen index "Q" for the male Obers. [7]
There is also a "Swiss themed" deck of cards, in which each of the eight Ober and Under cards represents a character from Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (William Tell himself is Eichel-Ober). This deck was designed in Hungary in 1835 as a means to express resentment against Habsburg Austrian rule since the play was also about a revolt against the Habsburgs. This deck is today known throughout the former Austro-Hungarian empire but it is not in use in Switzerland.
In playing cards, a suit is one of the categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several pips (symbols) showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or additionally be indicated by the color printed on the card. The rank for each card is determined by the number of pips on it, except on face cards. Ranking indicates which cards within a suit are better, higher or more valuable than others, whereas there is no order between the suits unless defined in the rules of a specific card game. In most decks, there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called jokers.
In a deck of playing cards, the term face card (US) or court card, and sometimes royalty, is generally used to describe a card that depicts a person as opposed to the pip cards. In a standard 52-card pack of the English pattern, these cards are the King, Queen and Jack. The term picture card is also common, but that term sometimes includes the Aces.
Playing cards have been in Italy since the late 14th century. Until the mid 19th century, Italy was composed of many smaller independent states which led to the development of various regional patterns of playing cards; "Italian suited cards" normally only refer to cards originating from northeastern Italy around the former Republic of Venice, which are largely confined to northern Italy, parts of Switzerland, Dalmatia and southern Montenegro. Other parts of Italy traditionally use traditional local variants of Spanish suits, French suits or German suits.
Jass is a family of trick taking, ace–ten card games and, in its key forms, a distinctive branch of the marriage family. It is popular in its native Switzerland as well as the rest of the Alemannic German-speaking area of Europe, Italian South Tyrol and in a few places in Wisconsin, Ohio, California, Oregon and Washington USA.
Karnöffel is a trick-taking card game which probably came from the upper-German language area in Europe in the first quarter of the 15th century. It first appeared listed in a municipal ordinance of Nördlingen, Bavaria, in 1426 among the games that could be lawfully played at the annual city fête. This makes the game the oldest identifiable European card game in the history of playing cards with a continuous tradition of play down to the present day.
Kaiserspiel, also called Kaisern or Cheisärä, is a card game, usually for 4 or 6 players, that is played in parts of Switzerland using a variant of the standard Swiss playing cards with 40 or 48 cards. It is a descendant of Karnöffel, one of the oldest card games known. It is sometimes misleadingly called Kaiserjass, although it has nothing to do with the Jass family of games that are popular in Switzerland.
A trump is a playing card which is elevated above its usual rank in trick-taking games. Typically an entire suit is nominated as a trump suit; these cards then outrank all cards of plain (non-trump) suits. In other contexts the terms trump card or to trump refers to any sort of action, authority or policy which automatically prevails over all others.
The Bourgeois Tarot deck is a mid-19th century pattern of tarot cards of German origin that is used for playing card games in western Europe and Canada. It is not designed for divinatory purposes. This deck is most commonly found in France, Belgian Wallonia, Swiss Romandy and the Canadian province of Québec for playing French Tarot; in southwest Germany for playing Cego and Dreierles; and in Denmark for Danish Tarok.
The Swiss Tarot deck is a 78-card deck used for the tarot card games Troccas and Troggu. It is also sometimes called the JJ Tarot due to the replacement of the usual second and fifth trumps with cards depicting Juno and Jupiter, or as 1JJ Tarot in reference to the catalog number of a common release of the deck by A.G. Müller.
Johann Kaspar Hechtel was a German businessman, owner of a brass factory in Nuremberg, non-fiction writer and designer of parlour games including the prototype for the Petit Lenormand cartomancy deck. According to published biographies, Hechtel also contributed anonymously to some treatises on physics.
German-suited playing cards are a very common style of traditional playing card used in many parts of Central Europe characterised by 32- or 36-card packs with the suits of Acorns, Leaves, Hearts and Bells. The German suit system is one of the oldest, becoming standard around 1450 and, a few decades later, influencing the design of the now international French suit system of Clubs, Spades, Hearts and Diamonds. Today German-suited playing cards are common in south and east Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland, Liechtenstein, north Italy, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, northern Serbia, southern Poland and central and western Romania.
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 or four face/court cards. In a standard 52-card deck these are the valet, the dame, and the roi (king). In addition, in Tarot packs, there is a cavalier (cavalier) ranking between the queen and the jack. 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 also known as the International or Anglo-American pattern.
Acorns is one of the four playing card suits in a deck of German-suited and Swiss-suited playing cards. This suit was invented in 15th-century German-speaking lands and is a survivor from a large pool of experimental suit signs created to replace the Latin suits. Around 1480, French card makers adapted this sign into clubs in a French deck.
Bells is one of the four playing card suits in a deck of Swiss-suited and German-suited playing cards. Unlike the other German suits, this suit was not adapted by French card makers. In its place, there was initially a suit of red crescents until the suit of Diamonds was added to the French pack. The suit is usually known in German as Schellen, but is sometimes abbreviated to Schell. Cards are referred to as in a French deck e.g. the "9 of Bells", but in German as Schellen 9, or the "Unter of Bells".
Binokel is a card game for two to eight players that originated in Switzerland as Binocle, but spread to the German state of Württemberg, where it is typically played with a Württemberg pattern pack. It is still popular in Württemberg, where it is usually played in groups of three or four as a family game rather than in the pubs. In three-hand games, each player competes for himself, while in four-hand games, known as Cross Binokel (Kreuzbinokel), two teams are formed with partners sitting opposite one another. The game was introduced to America by German immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, where it developed into the similar game of pinochle. Binocle was still played in Switzerland in 1994. In south Germany, the game is sometimes called by its Swabian name, Benoggl.
Blattla is a Bavarian card game for four players, who usually form two teams of two for each deal. It is a simplified version of Schafkopf and Bierkopf and is thus a point-trick game. Unlike those two games, in Blattla the Obers and Unters are not permanent trumps. In order to learn the rules of Schafkopf, it can be an advantage to first become familiar with Blattla. The game is traditionally played with Bavarian pattern cards.
The Banner is a playing card used in Swiss-suited cards and which historically formed part of the standard 36- or 48-card German-suited packs. It is equivalent to a 10, being ranked between a 9 and an Unter.
The Marriage group is a large family of point-trick card games in which the 'marriage' of two cards, usually a king and queen, plays an important role and attracts a bonus. They are believed to be descended from a German game, Mariagenspiel or Mariage, which dates back to at least 1715. Well-known games in this group include bezique and the national card games of Austria (Schnapsen), Hungary (ulti), France (belote), Switzerland (Jass) and the Netherlands (klaverjas).