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Sport and Games Atlas

One Card Mechanic, Three Different Fates

09/20/2026 12:00:00 AM

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Trick-Taking Card Games groups thirteen games by one shared mechanic: players play cards in turn and the highest card, by some rule, wins the trick. What the games became after adopting that mechanic differs by country and by century. The oldest documented branch is Italian. Tarot card games began in Italy in the early to mid fifteenth century as a trick-taking format built around a permanent trump suit, historically called trionfi or atouts. The deck's later, and separate, use for cartomancy and fortune telling came afterward; regional descendants such as French Tarot and Central European Tarock are still played today as trick-taking games in their own right, unrelated to fortune telling. The English branch went a different direction entirely. Whist, established by the seventeenth century, became a codified standard through Edmond Hoyle's 1742 A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, the source of the phrase according to Hoyle. Whist is bridge's direct ancestor: bridge passed through an intermediate bridge whist and then auction bridge, developed around 1904, before the American businessman Harold Vanderbilt codified contract bridge's scoring table in 1925, reportedly during a Caribbean cruise aboard the SS Finland. Contract bridge is now organized internationally as a mind sport under the World Bridge Federation. A third branch stayed regional. Skat, developed in the German town of Altenburg in the early nineteenth century out of the older German game Schafkopf, never went through a codification into a global sport; instead it became, and remains, Germany's own national card game with its own club and tournament structure. One mechanic, arriving in three countries at different times, produced a fortune-telling deck, a global mind sport and a national pastime, without a common institution behind any of the three outcomes.

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