Macao is an old European gambling card game played with a standard French-suited deck and closely related to Baccarat. It is first documented in a 1774 source, and its exact origin is uncertain, with some accounts tracing it to Hungary and others to Italy, though the name recalls the Portuguese colony of Macao, a historic gambling center. Like Baccarat, the game centers on players and a banker comparing card totals to reach or approach a target value, with wagers settled on whose hand comes closer, and it spread across European gaming houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as one of several related banking games built on the same simple point-counting principle before being displaced in popularity by its better-known relative.
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Game Type (category) Sources
1. Macao (card game) (Wikipedia)
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Macao is an old, European gambling card game played with French playing cards that is related to Baccarat.
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It was first mentioned in 1774, and may have originated in Hungary or Italy.
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