Across time, playing-card manufacturers produced decks meant for other uses beyond simple card playing including: instruction, propaganda and advertising. French suits were a revision of the German ones; keeping hearts but replacing bells with diamonds, acorns with clovers while clubs and leaves became pikes or spades.
The term ‘Joker’ has its origins in the germanic spelling of Euchre (Juker or Juckerspiel). Around 1860 the Joker card evolved in Euchre to replace the blank card being used as the ‘best bower’ or highest trump card.
DID YOU KNOW Breakout was an arcade game developed and published by Atari, Inc and released on 13 May 1976. It was conceived as a Nolan Bushnell/Steve Bristow partnership and built by Steve Wozniak with the help of Steve Jobs. Breakout was a stable mate of the earlier Alan Alcorn creation, ‘Pong.’
DID YOU KNOW The card game ‘Hearts’ aka Rickety Kate in Australia shares some similarities and is the closest established game to BAM! Both are trick-taking games. It’s also known as Black Lady, Black Maria or Black Widow which is a reference to the Queen of Clubs aka ‘Calamity Jane’ and has a 13 point […]
DID YOU KNOW In an earlier post we talked about the origins of Tetris. The first version of Tetris was a text-based computer game using square brackets [ ] to make up a block.
