Sport and Games Atlas

How The Game Is Played
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Game

Piquet

Trick-Taking Card Games

Piquet is a trick-taking card game for two players, played with a shortened thirty-two-card deck, in which players score points both by declaring card combinations held in their hand before play, such as sequences and sets, and by winning tricks during play. The game originated in France, with its standard form established by the sixteenth century, and it became especially popular among the French and English aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Piquet is regarded as one of the older members of the trick-taking card game family and influenced the scoring and combination-declaring structure of several later games.

Facts
Partially Attested
Origin Year
1535 1
This is the year of the earliest written reference to the game, as Le Cent in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, not a confirmed invention date; a legendary attribution to La Hire during the Hundred Years War is noted but not substantiated by the source
Originating Region
France 1
Game Type
Plain-trick card game 1
Classification
Player Count
Two-Player 1
Sport
Game Type (category)
Card Game 1
Connections

Ancestor Of

Bezique, Games

Why this is disputed. Card-game historians hold competing accounts of Bezique's exact ancestry (French and Swiss claims both exist); descent from Piquet-family trick-and-meld play is the mainstream account, not a settled one.

Source The Oxford Guide to Card Games
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Piquet (Wikipedia)
  • Opening paragraph
    Piquet is an early 16th-century plain-trick card game for two players that became France's national game.
  • Lead sentence, game classification
    Piquet is an early 16th-century plain-trick card game for two players that became France's national game.
  • History section, first paragraph
    It is first mentioned, as Le Cent, in a written reference dating to 1535, in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.
  • entity record, description lead (player-count)
    Piquet is a trick-taking card game for two players, played with a shortened thirty-two-card deck, in which players score points both by declaring card combinations held in their hand before play, such as sequences and sets, and by winning tricks during play. The game originated in France, with its standard form established by the sixteenth century, and it became especially popular among
View the Source
Wikidata: Piquet
Wikidata Q655453, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source

Take a Related Quiz

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.