Madiao

Madiao is a late imperial Chinese trick-taking gambling card game also known by the name of the game of paper tiger, played with a specialized deck of forty money-suited cards rather than the pip and court cards familiar from Western decks. A hand pits three players in loose cooperation against a fourth who serves as banker, a lopsided arrangement described in Chinese sources as resembling a horse standing on one raised leg while the other three remain planted on the ground. The deck itself was documented by the writer Lu Rong in the fifteenth century, and the rules of play were later recorded by Pan Zhiheng and by Feng Menglong in the early seventeenth century. According to the Korean poet Jang Hon, the game's origins reach back further still, to the Yuan dynasty of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Madiao remained a popular pastime through the Qing dynasty before falling out of common play by roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Play proceeds counter-clockwise and a single hand typically lasts about twenty minutes, combining the drawing of cards from a stock, memory of what has already been played, and tactical decisions about which cards to contest as tricks are won and lost by the players ranged against the banker.