For: Card Game (pricing game)

A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary things with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). Some games have formally standardized rules, while rules for others can vary by region, culture, and person.

The deck

main: playing card A card game is played with a deck of cards intended for that game that are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. The backs of the cards in a deck are indistinguishable, preventing any player who cannot see the card's face from knowing its value. The faces of the cards in a deck may all be unique, or may include duplicates, depending on the game. In either case, any card is readily identifiable by its face. The set of cards that make up the deck are known to all of the players using that deck.

The form and composition of European-style playing card decks have evolved over more than 600 years, and a variety of cultural decks have resulted. The deck most often seen in English-speaking cultures, and common in other countries where the deck has been introduced, is the Anglo-American poker deck. This deck contains 52 unique cards in the four French suits (Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs) and thirteen ranks running from two (deuce) to ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace. Commercial poker decks commonly include two to four Jokers, which are used in some games as special cards (the role of the Joker varies by game and region).

Other decks, though less popular globally, are mainstays of a particular culture's card games. For example, a 32-card deck (no values 2-6) is known as a piquet deck and is used for many European card games including Belote, the most popular card game in France. A similar deck using German suits (leaves, hearts, bells and acorns) is used for the card game Skat, which is the national card game of Germany and also immensely popular in neighboring countries like Switzerland and Austria. Variants of the 78-card Tarot deck, largely known in the U.S. for its use in occultist divination, are common through most of continental Europe to play a family of card games known as Tarot, Tarock or Tarocco, depending on the language. The French game of this family is second only to Belote in its popularity there. The 48-card hanafuda deck is popular in Japan, and derived from a 48-card deck introduced in the 1500s by Portuguese explorers. Italian decks typically contain 40 cards in the four French suits or in the four Italian suits (Cups, Coins, Swords and Staves).

There are also some card games that require multiple copies of the same deck, or copies of subsets of a deck. For Pinochle and its parent Bezique, a single "deck" is composed of two poker or piquet decks with all values from 2-8 removed; originally this actually required two poker decks, but the game's popularity led to the commercialization of a specific single deck of the needed values. Four-player variants commonly use two such decks; the equivalent of all high-value cards from 4 poker decks. For games such as blackjack, multiple full poker decks are used to discourage card counting, and variants of many other card games use multiple decks shuffled together when a large number of players are participating. In these scenarios, a "deck" refers to one set of the necessary cards, while a "pack" or "shoe" refers to the collection of "decks" as a whole used to play the game.