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According to Hoyle, and Other Facts Behind the Trick-Taking Family

09/20/2026 12:00:00 AM

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Tarot card games began in Italy in the early to mid fifteenth century purely as trick-taking games, built around a permanent trump suit called trionfi or atouts. Their later use for cartomancy and fortune telling came afterward and separately; French Tarot and Central European Tarock remain played as competitive trick-taking games today. The phrase according to Hoyle comes from a specific book: Edmond Hoyle's 1742 A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, which became a best-selling standard reference for the game. Contract bridge's modern scoring table, the version still used today, was worked out by the American businessman Harold Vanderbilt in 1925, reportedly during a Caribbean cruise aboard the SS Finland. Skat, widely regarded as Germany's national card game, was developed in the early nineteenth century in the German town of Altenburg, drawing on an earlier German game called Schafkopf.

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