Suits (cards)
The
four Anglo-American playing card suits:
spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds.
In playing cards, a suit is one of several categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several symbols showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or in addition be indicated by the color printed on the card. Most card decks also have a rank for each card, and may include special cards in the deck that belong to no suit.
Traditional Western playing cards
A set of 52 playing cards.
Although many different types of deck have been known and used in Europe since the introduction of playing cards around the 14th century (see playing cards)?and several different ones are still used in various regions for various games?almost all of them have in common that:
- there are exactly four suits (possibly with the addition of some non-suited cards, see below);
- the cards within each suit are distinguished from one another by bearing different numbers or names, known as ranks;
- the ranks serve the explicit purpose of indicating which cards within a suit are "better", "higher" or "more valuable" than others, whereas there is no order between the different suits; and
- there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suits.
The differences between European decks are mostly in the number of cards in each suit (for example, thirteen in the commonly-known Anglo-American deck, fourteen in the French Tarot, eight in most games in Germany and Austria, ten in Italy, five in Hungarian Illustrated Tarock) and in the inclusion or exclusion of an extra series of (usually) twenty-one numbered cards known as tarocks or Major Arcana, sometimes considered as a fifth suit, but more properly regarded as a group of special suitless cards, to form what is known as a Tarot deck.
The Spanish-style suits are the original suits (which is why the English term 'spade' refers not to the tool, but derived from the Spanish word for sword, which this suit represents), the suits found on the divinatory Tarot deck, and the suits found in the oldest surviving European decks. The French style suits became popular after they were introduced, largely because cards using those suits were less expensive to manufacture; the traditional suits required a woodcut for each card, while with the French suits the "pip" cards?the cards containing only a certain number of the suit objects?could be made by stencils, and only the "court" cards, the cards with human figures, required woodcuts.
The following table shows the original equivalence between various names and designs used for the suits in traditional decks in different parts of Europe. It does not show every country individually (for example, France and Denmark have 78-card Tarot decks, but they use the familiar hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs), although Anglo-American decks are known in every country, and would be used for imported games such as bridge.
| Traditional Western Playing Cards | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Culture | Suit | |||
| Anglo-French suits | Hearts (♥) (C?urs, Hearts) |
Diamonds (♦) (Carreaux, Squares) |
Clubs (♣) (Tr?les, Clovers) |
Spades (♠) (Piques, Pikes) |
| German suits | Hearts (Herz)  |
Bells (Schellen)  |
Acorns (Eichel)  |
Leaves or Grass  (Laub or Gras) |
| Swiss German suits | Shields (Schilten) | Bells (Schellen) | Acorns (Eicheln) | Flowers (Rosen) |
| Italo-Spanish suits | Cups (coppe / copas) | Coins (denari / oros) | Clubs (bastoni / bastos) | Swords (spade / espadas) |
| Tarot suits | Cups | Pentacles, Coins | Wands, Rods | Swords |
Suits in games with traditional decks
A huge number of card games have been invented for the Anglo-American deck, and as such the general statement that "suits are usually equal" now has countless exceptions.
Trumps
In a large and popular category of trick-taking games, traditionally called whist-style games although the best-known example may now be bridge, one suit is designated in each hand of play 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. In most such games, trump cards cannot be played if the player can follow suit to the card led to the trick; in a few, trumps can be played at any time. The result of this is that trump cards are more likely to win tricks than cards of a non-trump suit of the same value. The "Major Arcana" of the Tarot cards are used as a permanent suit of trumps in the game of tarocchi or tarock.
It is unclear whether the word "trump" derives from "triumph", documented as the name of a card game in 1529, or from "trump", meaning to deceive or cheat, from the French tromper.
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.
Ordering suits
Whist-style rules generally prevent the necessity of determining which of two cards are different suits has higher value, 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 make a definition of which suit is intrinsically the most valuable. An example of this is in auction games such as bridge, where if one player bids to make some number of heart tricks and another bids to make the same number of diamond tricks, there must be a mechanism to determine which takes precedence.
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):
- Bridge: spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs (for bidding and scoring);
- Five Hundred: hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades (for bidding and scoring);
- Ninety-nine: clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds (supposedly mnemonic as they have respectively 3, 2, 1, 0 lobes; see article for how this scoring is used);
- Skat: clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds (for bidding and scoring and to determine which Jack beats which in play).
Pairing or ignoring suits
In some games, such as blackjack, suits are completely meaningless and are ignored. In a few games, such as Canasta and the Klondike solitaire game popularized by Windows 3.1, only the color (red or black) is important?thus, hearts and diamonds are equivalent to each other, but not to spades or clubs. This, at least notionally, creates problems with four-color decks (see below).
Bridge players constructing complex signaling systems have found it useful to give names to every possible pair of suits (so that they can agree that a particular bid means, for example, that they hold "five of a red suit": see also two suiter). There are three ways to divide four suits into pairs, and they are known as red (hearts and diamonds) versus black, major (spades and hearts, a reference to the suit order as above) versus minor, and pointed (diamonds and spades, which visually have a sharp point uppermost) versus rounded. 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).
Suits and colors
It has frequently been observed that printing the four different suits in four different colors would be visually less confusing than the traditional system of using just two (which in any case probably arose from a printing economy no longer necessary?see Playing cards). Indeed, most European languages simply call the suit of a card its "colour". Four-color decks are in use in specific games (such as Barry's & Les's) or in places where visibility may not be ideal (or on a computer screen). In these, most commonly diamonds are blue cards, hearts are red cards, spades are black cards and clubs are green cards.
Adding extra suits to the Anglo-American deck
Various people have independently suggested expanding the Anglo-American deck to five, six or even more 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 (see external links).
Commercial decks
Commercially available five-suit (65-card) decks include Stardeck, which introduces "stars" as a fifth suit, and Cinco Loco, which introduces "5"s. In both decks the fifth suit is colored a mixture of black and red. Older British cards used blue-colored crowns as a fifth suit.
Commercially available six-suit (78-card) decks include the Empire Deck (which has three red suits and three black suits, introducing crowns in red and anchors in black) and Sextet (which has two red suits, two black suits, and two blue suits). Previously, another commercial deck was manufactured by Five Star Games, which had a gold colored fifth suit of five pointed stars. The court cards are almost identical to the diamond suit in a Gemaco Five-Star deck. Cadaco manufactured a game "Tripoley Wild" with a fifth suit, (and other Wild Cards,) which contain pips of all four standard suits (hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs) on one card. That deck is not sold separately, but as part of boxed game.
Home-made decks
If extra-suited decks are not readily available or are too expensive, an easier way to create a deck with up to eight suits is to buy two identical decks and modify the suit symbols throughout one of them with a marker. R. Wayne Schmittberger in New Rules for Classic Games originated the idea of drawing an arrow through each heart to create "valentines" and a cross through each diamond to create "kites". Erick Flaig suggests that clubs could have their stem rounded to create "cloverleaves" and spades could have horns and tail added to become "devils".
Other modern suited decks
Suit-and-value decks
A large number of games are based around a deck in which each card has a value and a suit (usually represented by a color), and for each suit there is exactly one card having each value, though in many cases the deck has various special cards as well. Examples include Tichu, M?und Mehr, Lost Cities, Sticheln, Rage, Schotten Totten, Wizard and ROOK.
Other suited decks
Decks for some games are divided into suits, but otherwise bear little relation to traditional games. An example would be the 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) 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 value 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 cards and another, mostly high cards.
A special mention should be made of the card game Set. 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 suits, combining the standard Anglo-American ones with the traditional/Tarot/Spanish ones. The Discordian deck is a parody of the Tarot deck, its five suits corresponding to the five Discordian elements.
