All fours (card game)

All fours is a traditional English trick-taking card game that was once widely played in public houses and among the gentry, and that flourished as a gambling game through the nineteenth century. According to Charles Cotton's 1674 book The Compleat Gamester, the game originated in the county of Kent before spreading throughout England and, eventually, abroad, and it likely has Dutch ancestry. All fours is notable for giving the playing card its English name jack, a term that displaced the older word knave. The game was originally designed for two players, though variants for three or more later developed, and it spawned a wider family of related games including pitch, pedro and cinch. It remains especially popular today in Trinidad and Tobago, where it is regarded as the national card game, and it survives in some regional pockets of England as well. Each player is dealt six cards from a standard deck, and unusually a player may trump a trick even when able to follow suit. The game's name refers to the four ways a hand can score a point, for holding the highest trump in play, the lowest trump in play, winning the trick containing the jack of trumps, and taking the greater share of card points overall; a player who wins all four in a single hand wins the whole game outright. Depending on the variant played, a full game is won by the first side to reach seven or eleven points.