The game was certainly known by 1821 when it is briefly described in a play by von Voss in which the player left holding the Black Peter lost.

[4] The game is known as zwartepieten ("playing Black Pete"), pijkezotjagen ("Chasing the jack of spades") or simply as Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands and as Asinello ("little donkey") in Italy.

In Sweden the game is called Svarte Petter, in Finland Musta Pekka, in Denmark Sorteper, in Croatia Crni Petar,[5] or Krampus,[6] and in Greek as "mu(n)tzuris" (μου(ν)τζούρης, "smudged, smutted").

[10] It is probably much older and once a simple gambling game in which the aim was to determine a loser who had to pay for the next round of drinks (cf.

[11] An article in an 1862 issue of Deutsches Magazin says that Black Peter was originally a subgame of the student drinking game of Quodlibet which, however, is not attested before 1845.

[a] The player who is last in and left holding Black Peter is the loser and may originally have had to pay for the next round.

In this way, the game continues until all pairs are discarded and one player is left with Black Peter as the only card.

If it becomes clear that no-one has any pairs, the next player draws an extra card from stock to get the game going again.