Tontine (card game)

Tontine is a historical French gambling card game for five to twelve players, played with a single standard fifty two card French suited deck and documented in print since at least 1725. It is a social game of pure chance rather than skill: chips known as jetons circulate around the table and into a shared pool as cards are dealt and revealed, with the pool changing hands repeatedly over the course of play, until eventually one player accumulates every chip in circulation and wins the whole pot. Its name echoes the tontine, a much older financial and insurance arrangement in which participants pool funds and the surviving members progressively absorb the shares of those who drop out, and the card game borrows that same last player standing logic and applies it to a simple circulating pool of gambling chips rather than money invested over years.