Suit (cards)

History

Various languages have different terminology for suits such as colors, signs, or seeds. Modern Western playing cards are generally divided into two or three general suit-systems. The older Latin suits are subdivided into the Italian and Spanish suit-systems. The younger Germanic suits are subdivided into the German and Swiss suit-systems. The French suits are a derivative of the German suits but are generally considered a separate system on its own.

Origin and development of the Latin suits

The Latin suits consist of coins, clubs, cups, and swords. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, having been adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, employed the same suits, but the clubs represented polo sticks. Europeans changed that suit as polo was an obscure sport to them. Ultimately the suits can trace their roots back to China where playing cards were first invented. The earliest card games were trick-taking games and the invention of suits increased the level of strategy and depth in these games. A card of one suit cannot beat a card from another regardless of its rank. The concept of suits predate playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as Tien Gow.

Chinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit-system. The money-suit system is based on denominations of currency: Coins, Strings of Coins, Myriads of Strings, and Tens of Myriads. Old Chinese coins had holes in the middle to allow them to be strung together. A string of coins could easily be misinterpreted as a stick to those unfamiliar with them. The Mamluks called their suit of cups Myriads and this may have been due to inverting the Chinese character for myriad (万). The Mamluk suit of swords may also have been inspired by the Chinese numeral for Ten (十). Another clue linking these Chinese, Muslim, and European cards are the ranking of certain suits. In many early Chinese games like Madiao, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones. In the Indo-Persian game of Ganjifa, half the suits were also inverted, including a suit of coins. This was also true for the European games of Tarot and Ombre. The inverting of suits had no purpose in regards to gameplay but was an artifact from the earliest games.

There are four types of Latin suits: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and an extinct archaic type. The systems can be distinguished by the pips of their long suits: swords and clubs. Italian swords are curved outward and the clubs appear to be batons. They intersect one another. Spanish swords are straight, and the clubs appear to be knobbly cudgels. They do not cross each other. Portuguese pips are like the Spanish, but they intersect like Italian ones. They sometimes have dragons on the aces. This system lingers on only in the Tarocco Siciliano and the Unsun Karuta of Japan. The archaic system is like the Italian one, but the swords are curved inward so they touch each other without intersecting. Minchiate used a mixed system of Italian clubs and Portuguese swords.

Despite a long history of trade with China, Japan was introduced to playing cards with the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s. Early locally made cards, Karuta, were very similar to Portuguese decks. Increasing restrictions by the Tokugawa shogunate on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the Hanafuda card deck that today is used most often for fishing-type games. The role of rank and suit in organizing cards became switched, so the hanafuda deck has 12 suits, each representing a month of the year, and each suit has 4 cards, most often two normal, one Ribbon and one Special (though August, November and December each differ uniquely from this convention).

Invention of the Germanic suits

During the 15th-century, manufacturers in German speaking lands experimented with various new suit systems to replace the Latin suits. One early deck had five suits, the Latin ones with an extra suit of shields. The Swiss-Germans developed their own suits of shields, roses, acorns, and bells around 1450. Instead of roses and shields, the Germans settled with hearts and leaves around 1460. The French derived their suits of trèfles (clovers or clubs♣), carreaux (tiles or diamonds♦), cœurs (hearts♥), and piques (pikes or spades♠) from the German suits around 1480. French suits correspond closely with German suits with the exception of the tiles with the bells but there is one early French deck that had crescents instead of tiles. The English names for the French suits of clubs and spades may simply have been carried over from the older Latin suits.

Tarot

Beginning around 1440 in northern Italy, some decks started to include of an extra suit of (usually) 21 numbered cards known as trionfi or trumps, to play tarot card games. Always included in tarot decks is one card, the Fool or Excuse, which may be part of the trump suit depending on the game or region. These cards do not have pips or face cards like the other suits. Most tarot decks used for games come with French suits but Italian suits are still used in Piedmont, Bologna, and pockets of Switzerland. A few Sicilian towns use the Portuguese-suited Tarocco Siciliano, the only deck of its kind left in Europe.

Trumps

In a large and popular category of trick-taking games, one suit may be designated in each deal to be trump and all cards of the trump suit rank above all non-trump cards, and automatically prevail over them, losing only to a higher trump if one is played to the same trick. Non-trump suits are called plain suits.

Special suits

Some games treat one or more suits as being special or different from the others. A simple example is Spades, which uses spades as a permanent trump suit. A less simple example is Hearts, which is a kind of point trick game in which the object is to avoid taking tricks containing hearts. With typical rules for Hearts (rules vary slightly) the queen of spades and the two of clubs (sometimes also the jack of diamonds) have special effects, with the result that all four suits have different strategic value. Tarot decks have a dedicated trump suit.

Ranking of suits

Whist-style rules generally preclude the necessity of determining which of two cards of different suits has higher rank, because a card played on a card of a different suit either automatically wins or automatically loses depending on whether the new card is a trump. However, some card games also need to define relative suit rank. An example of this is in auction games such as bridge, where if one player wishes to bid to make some number of heart tricks and another to make the same number of diamond tricks, there must be a mechanism to determine which takes precedence in the bidding order.

As there is no truly standard way to order the four suits, each game that needs to do so has its own convention; however, the ubiquity of bridge has gone some way to make its ordering a de facto standard. Typical orderings of suits include (from highest to lowest):

Pairing or ignoring suits

The pairing of suits is a vestigial remnant of Ganjifa, a game where half the suits were in reverse order, the lower cards beating the higher. In Ganjifa, progressive suits were called "strong" while inverted suits were called "weak". In Latin decks, the traditional division is between the long suits of swords and clubs and the round suits of cups and coins. This pairing can be seen in Ombre and Tarot card games. German and Swiss suits lack pairing but French suits maintained them and this can be seen in the game of Spoil Five.

In some games, such as blackjack, suits are ignored. In other games, such as Canasta, only the color (red or black) is relevant. In yet others, such as bridge, each of the suit pairings are distinguished.

Fundamentally, there are three ways to divide four suits into pairs: by color, by rank and by shape resulting in six possible suit combinations.

In the event of widespread introduction of four-color decks, it has been suggested that the red/black distinction could be replaced by pointed bottoms (hearts and diamonds visually have a sharp point downwards, whereas spades and clubs have a blunt stem).

Four-color suits

Some decks, while using the French suits, give each suit a different color to make the suits more distinct from each other. In bridge, such decks are known as no-revoke decks, and the most common colors are black spades, red hearts, blue diamonds and green clubs, although in the past the diamond suit usually appeared in a golden yellow-orange. A pack occasionally used in Germany uses green spades (compare to leaves), red hearts, yellow diamonds (compare to bells) and black clubs (compare to acorns). This is a compromise deck devised to allow players from East Germany (who used German suits) and West Germany (who adopted the French suits) to be comfortable with the same deck when playing tournament Skat after the German reunification.

Historical French decks with extra suits

Numerous variations of the 52-card French deck have existed over the years. Most notably, Tarot Nouveau has a separate trump series in addition to the four suits; however this fifth suit is a series of cards of a different number and style than the suited cards. There have been many attempts at expanding the French deck to five, six or even more suits where the additional suits have the same number and style of cards as the French suits, and have proposed rules for expanded versions of popular games such as rummy, hearts, bridge, and poker that could be played with such a deck.

In 1895, Hiram Jones of the United States created one of the earliest decks with extra suits called International Playing Cards. In addition to the four standard French suits, it had two additional suits, red crosses and black bullets. (The bullets of that period were spherical, hence the pip was a circle.)

In the summer of 1937 in Vienna, Walter W. Marseille, with the help of Paul Stern, published rules for five-suit bridge which included a fifth suit of green Leaves, taken from German-suited William Tell cards. This set off a fad for five-suited decks which would last until the end of 1938.

De La Rue of London published packs called Five-Suit Bridge Playing Cards. This deck contained cards using blue crowns called Royals as a fifth suit. In the new suit, the court cards used the Paris pattern's heart suit designs. Waddingtons' 1937 print was a copy of De La Rue's with the exception of more detailed Royal crown pips. In 1938, they published several decks that used green crowns but the face cards for that suit were a duplicate of other English pattern suits. Due to unpopularity, they were withdrawn in 1939.

In 1938 there were three American decks that included a green Eagle as the fifth suit to avoid paying royalties as the Royals were copyrighted. The deck published by United States Playing Card Company (USPCC) used the Eagle in a medium green and the pips in the corner index were inside green circles. The second deck was by Russell Playing Cards (owned by the USPCC) used the same Eagle but in a darker shade and the pips in the corner index were devoid of the circle. These two decks reused the club courts for the new suit. The third deck was by Arrco and used an Eagle as well but reused the spade courts. At least six bridge books were subsequently published to support playing bridge with rules for this fifth suit by authors such as Oswald Jacoby, P. Hal Sims and Howard Schenken. It is more than likely the book that Arrco published was for their own deck. The title of a science-fiction novel by James Blish, Jack of Eagles, refers to the main character being different.

Also in 1938, Parker Brothers created a five-suit bridge deck called Castle Bridge, in which the fifth suit of Castles looked like a Rook chess piece and was colored green. This pack reused the diamond courts for the new suit. The manual that came with this deck did not use Marseille's rules but Ammiel F. Decker's 1933 rules.

Suited-and-ranked decks

A large number of games are based around a deck in which each card has a rank and a suit (usually represented by a color), and for each suit there is exactly one card having each rank, though in many cases the deck has various special cards as well. Examples include Lost Cities, Rage, UNO, Phase 10, Skip-Bo, and Rook.

Other modern decks

Decks for some games are divided into suits, but otherwise bear little relation to traditional games. An example would be the board game Taj Mahal, in which each card has one of four background colors, the rule being that all the cards played by a single player in a single round must be the same color. The selection of cards in the deck of each color is approximately the same and the player's choice of which color to use is guided by the contents of their particular hand.

In the trick-taking card game Flaschenteufel ("The Bottle Imp"), all cards are part of a single sequence ranked from 1 to 37 but split into three suits depending on its rank. players must follow the suit led, but if they are void in that suit they may play a card of another suit and this can still win the trick if its rank is high enough. For this reason every card in the deck has a different number to prevent ties. A further strategic element is introduced since one suit contains mostly low-ranking cards and another, mostly high-ranking cards.

Whereas cards in a traditional deck have two classifications—suit and rank—and each combination is represented by one card, giving for example 4 suits × 13 ranks = 52 cards, each card in a Set deck has four classifications each into one of three categories, giving a total of 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81 cards. Any one of these four classifications could be considered a suit, but this is not really enlightening in terms of the structure of the game.

Fictional decks

Several people have invented decks which are not meant to be seriously played. The Double Fanucci deck from Zork takes the most imaginative licence with the suits: it has no fewer than fifteen, with the names Mazes, Books, Rain, Bugs, Fromps, Inkblots, Scythes, Plungers, Faces, Time, Lamps, Hives, Ears, Zurfs, and Tops.

The Cripple Mr. Onion deck uses eight fictional suits, but may be simulated by combining the standard French suits with the traditional Latin suited ones or by using a modern 8-suited deck.

The Discordian deck is a parody of the Tarot deck, its five suits corresponding to the five Discordian elements.

The card game of sabacc from the Star Wars universe has the suits of staves, flasks, sabers, and coins (similar to Latin suits), with cards ranked one through fifteen, plus two each of eight other cards which have no suit.

The deck used in Firefly has suits of Plum, Peach, Orange, Apple, Apricot, and Banana.

In World of Warcraft, there are cards that randomly drop from humanoid enemies. If a player collected the entire suit, he/she could trade it for a trinket that would grant special abilities. Initially, this was limited to the ace through eight of the suits of Elementals, Beasts, Warlords, and Portals. A later content patch added the suits of Lunacy, Storms, Furies, and Blessings. The Inscription skill allowed the crafting of cards of the suits of Mages, Swords, Rogues, and Demons.

In Robert Asprin's MythAdventures series, Dragon Poker is played using a standard deck, but with the suits consisting of elves, ogres, unicorns and dragons.

Uses of playing card suit symbols

Card suit symbols occur in places outside card playing:

Character encodings

In computer and another digital media, suit symbols are represented with character encoding, notably in the ISO and Unicode standards, and as Web standard (SGML's named entity "&name;" syntax):

Unicode is the most frequently used encoding standard, and suits are in the Miscellaneous Symbols Block (2600–26FF) of the Unicode.

Metaphorical uses

In some card games the card suits have a dominance order: club (lowest) - diamond - heart - spade (highest). That led to in spades being used to mean more than expected, in abundance, very much.

Other expressions drawn from bridge and similar games include strong suit (any area of personal strength) and follow suit (to imitate another's actions).