Origin and development of the Latin suits

Latin card suits

Italian[lower-alpha 1]	Cups (Coppe)	Coins (Denari)	Clubs (Bastoni)	Swords (Spade)
Spanish[lower-alpha 2]	Cups (Copas)	Coins (Oros)	Clubs (Bastos)	Swords (Espadas)

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 predates 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 (or of coins), 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.

By then the Islamic world had spread into Central Asia and had contacted China, and had adopted playing cards. The Muslims renamed the suit of myriads as cups; this may have been due to seeing a Chinese character for "myriad" (万) upside-down. The Chinese numeral character for Ten (十) on the Tens of Myriads suit may have inspired the Muslim suit of swords.^[3] 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 terms of play but was an artifact from the earliest games.

These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, used the suits coins, clubs, cups, and swords, but the clubs represented polo sticks; Europeans changed that suit, as polo was an obscure sport to them.

The Latin suits are coins, clubs, cups, and swords. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, and were adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s.

There are four types of Latin suits: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,^{[lower-alpha 3]} and an extinct archaic type.^[4][5] The systems can be distinguished by the pips of their long suits: swords and clubs.

• Northern Italian swords are curved outward and the clubs appear to be batons. They intersect one another.
• Southern Italian and Spanish swords are straight, and the clubs appear to be knobbly cudgels. They do not cross each other (The common exception being the three of clubs).
• Portuguese pips are like the Spanish, but they intersect like Northern Italian ones. They sometimes have dragons on the aces.^[6] This system lingers on only in the Tarocco Siciliano and the Unsun Karuta of Japan.
• The archaic system^{[lower-alpha 4]} is like the Northern Italian one, but the swords are curved inward so they touch each other without intersecting.^[7][8]
• Minchiate (a game that used a 97-card deck) used a mixed system of Italian clubs and Portuguese swords.

Despite a long history of trade with China, Japan was not introduced to playing cards until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s.^{[lower-alpha 5]} 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 German and French suits

Comparison of German, French and Swiss suits^{[lower-alpha 6]}

Swiss-German[lower-alpha 7]	Roses[lower-alpha 8]	Bells[lower-alpha 9]	Acorns[lower-alpha 10]	Shields[lower-alpha 11]
German	Hearts[lower-alpha 12]	Bells[lower-alpha 13]	Acorns[lower-alpha 14]	Leaves[lower-alpha 15]
French	Hearts	Diamonds	Clubs[lower-alpha 16]	Spades[lower-alpha 17]

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.^[10] The Swiss-Germans developed their own suits of shields, roses, acorns, and bells around 1450.^[11] 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.^[12]

Tarot cards

Beginning around 1440 in northern Italy, some decks started to include an extra suit of (usually) 21 numbered cards known as trionfi or trumps, to play tarot card games.^[13] 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.

The esoteric use of Tarot packs emerged in France in the late 18th century, since when special packs intended for divination have been produced. These typically have the suits cups, pentacles (based on the suit of coins), wands (based on the suit of batons), and swords. The trump cards and Fool of traditional card playing packs were named the Major Arcana; the remaining cards, often embellished with occult images, were the Minor Arcana. Neither term is recognised by card players.^[14][15]

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.^[16] Non-trump suits are called plain suits.^[17]

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.

Chosen suits

Games of the Karnöffel Group have between one and four chosen suits, sometimes called selected suits or, misleadingly, trump suits. The chosen suits are typified by having a disrupted ranking and cards with varying privileges which may range from full to none and which may depend on the order they are played to the trick. For example, chosen Sevens may be unbeatable when led, but otherwise worthless. In Swedish Bräus some cards are even unplayable. In games where the number of chosen suits is less than four, the others are called unchosen suits and usually rank in their natural order.

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.

There is no standard order for the four suits and so there are differing conventions among games that need a suit hierarchy. Examples of suit order are (from highest to lowest):

High → low				Games	Mnemonic
♠	♥	♦	♣	Bridge for bidding and scoring Poker occasionally	Alphabetical order reversed: S, H, D, C
♠	♥	♣	♦	Big Two	1 tip, 2 halves, 3 leaves, 4 corners
♥	♦	♣	♠	Preferans only used for bidding Five Hundred for bidding and scoring Thirteen
♥	♦	♠	♣	Préférence only used for bidding
♣	♠	♥	♦	Skat for bidding (valued 12, 11, 10, 9) and to determine which Jack beats which in play Other European games such as Bruus
♣	♠	♥	♦	Cego for determining highest card in certain situations
♣	♥	♠	♦	Ninety-nine for scoring	3, 2, 1, 0 lobes

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.^[18]

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.

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

• Color is used to denote the red suits (hearts and diamonds) and the black suits (spades and clubs).
• Rank is used to indicate the major (spades and hearts) versus minor (diamonds and clubs) suits.
• Shape is used to denote the pointed (diamonds and spades, which visually have a sharp point uppermost) versus rounded (hearts and clubs) suits. This is used in bridge as a mnemonic.

Four-color suits

The aces of a four-color deck

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 (comparable to leaves), red hearts, yellow diamonds (comparable to bells) and black clubs (comparable 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.^[19]

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.

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.