Huh. That explains why in Portugal hearts is called “copas”. Also in Portugal diamonds are called “gold”. The design is the French one, but the names stayed the original ones.
All these designs have the same origin in tarot cards, they just evolved slightly differently.
Reading more about it, it seems like these are the original Latin suits, and the French tried to, and succeeded, in replacing them.
But “sticks” and “swords” are inverted, at least in this table.
I’m pretty sure this table is incorrect. Swords, spades and cloves are the same. Sticks, clubs, acorns are the same.
I heard about this, and I was excited to pick up a different style when I went to Germany. I got there, and all of the cards used the standard, international suits. No one knew what I was talking about.
The German suite is most common in east Germany. west Germans use the french deck, or if they’re playing German card games they use the tournament German deck (which is just the french deck with different colours)
Geographical east, not political East though, Bavaria very heavily uses the German deck. You don’t play Bavarian Schafkopf with a french deck. That’s just weird. I personally also find it weird to play mau mau or Schnautz (Schwimmen) with a French Deck. Doesn’t mean though, that we don’t use the French deck. You don’t play poker or rummy or cribbage for example with German cards. That’s equally as weird.
Huh? The German deck is also known as bavarian cards and they are very common in most of the German South. I’m from swabia and here you use different cards for different games.
Can you even play Schafskopf with the French deck??
Schafkopf rules.
Not just any colours but the ones of the German deck: Diamonds are orange because bells are orange, and spades are green because leaves are green. Also spades and leaves look almost identical anyway. Hearts are the same, and acorns become clubs.
And just to be pedantic: It’s not the “tournament deck”, it’s specifically the tournament deck for Skat, adopted when the East and German leagues reunified to avoid confusion. You’ll be hard-pressed to get your hands on a 6 or below in those colours because Skat uses 32 cards.
I do think it’s a good idea in general, though.
You should have asked for bavarian cards/ bayrische Karten and they would have probably known. They are not widely used in the north though.
The standard cards are everywhere, but the German variant is still used, at least in bavaria. Just talk with some grandpas in the village restaurants and they will gleefully get their cards out.
In Austria we’re almost always (= for everything except poker) using “doppeldeutsche” (double German) cards.
So, you would play Rommy or Canasta with the German cards?
We don’t play these games, we play others like Schnapsen or Hosn Owi instead
Which standard? There are plenty! ;p
In Portugal, while we use the French/English cards, we still called them by the old names (Spanish/Italian).
We call clovers paus (sticks, clubs), pikes are called espadas (swords), diamonds is ouros (gold, coins) and hearts are called copas (cups).
I always found weird how the names had nothing to do with the symbols themselves. Now I understand.
You can clearly see what region of Romania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 😅
Love that the Spanish are using Tarot suits for their standard playing cards.
Or is tarot using Spanish suits?
Great question! I was under the impression the Tarot came first.
I looked it up. Wikipedia says,
Tarot (/ˈtæroʊ/, first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarocks) is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, tarot-playing cards spread to most of Europe, evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and modern games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen. In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Thus, there are two distinct types of tarot packs in circulation: those used for card games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are occasionally used for cartomancy.
I meannot really entirely correct. Slovenia does not use mainly german suits. Yes the southeast does often play briškula using the italian suits, but the res of the country uses the french ones. I have never even seen anyone have a deck of german playing cards. In fact I have never even seen such cards in a store anywhere.
Italy is not completely correct. The orange area uses the drawing of a club (as in a thick wodden stick), they’re called “bastoni” (“sticks”).
RavenFellBlade @startrek.website
Love that the Spanish are using Tarot suits for their standard playing cards.
The spanish names are copas (cups), oros (gold), espadas(swords) y bastos ( clubs)
How do people play solitaire with non-french suited cards?
We don’t, or at least I have never tried it, but we have different card games for various types of cards, and we play these games more often than ‘normal’ card games. We also still have French playing cards for games like poker, blackjack, solitaire, and others, but they’re just not our main type of cards.
Thank God, I always assumed Germany was the only country with a weird ass set of playing cards
That’s more Venetian style, not Italian style
Not only do we have our own deck, we also have our own games, ask about the mus or the subastado
So interesting that according to this map Italy uses the Spanish version.
As a Bavarian I grew up with the German set but I myself prefer the french one. Don’t know why, I guess I just like it‘s style/asthetics more.
Didn‘t new about the Italian and Spanish ones until today.
Today i learned that what in romanian is called “black heart” is called spades or pikes in english
We also use cupă for the red heart and pică (pike) for the black one.
Spades for English. Pike for French.
Everything is fine except for the Itallians.
