Hoc Mazarin

Hoc Mazarin, often called simply Hoc, is a historical French gambling card game of the Stops family, played by two or three people. It was popular at the court of Versailles in the seventeenth century and takes its name from Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister to Louis XIII and Louis XIV, who probably invented it and was much in favour of it. It is mentioned in print as early as 1649, and its rules first appear in 1654 under the plain name Hoc; by 1730 they were printed as the rules of Hoc Mazarin, described as one of two variants, the other being Hoc de Lyon, which is nowhere described. The game is a multi-stake vying game in two stages. In the first, each player is dealt twelve cards (fifteen in a two-player game) from a standard pack and competes for three stakes: point, sequence and tricon. In the second, players play a form of Hoc in which the aim is to be first to shed every card in hand. Rules for it continued to be reprinted until the late nineteenth century.