Pope Joan (card game)

Pope Joan is an eighteenth-century English round game of cards for three to eight players, played with a stripped fifty-one-card French-suited deck around a circular board or cloth marked with betting compartments. It descends from the French games Matrimony and Comete, is related to German Poch and French Nain Jaune, and became a fixture of Victorian family gatherings before giving rise to simpler descendants such as Newmarket and Michigan. Its earliest printed rules appeared in an 1814 edition of Hoyle's Games, though a reference to the game under the name Pope Julius has been traced to 1732. Players compete to shed cards from their hand while collecting stake money from the board's numbered pools, with the eight of diamonds, called the Pope, paying out its own dedicated stake.