Cassino, sometimes spelt Casino, is an English card game for two to four players using a standard, 52-card, French-suited pack.

[2] Although Cassino is often claimed to be of Italian origin, detailed research by Franco Pratesi has shown that there is no evidence of it ever being played in Italy and the earliest references to its Italian cousins, Scopa and Scopone, post-date those of Cassino.

[5] In fact, as "Cassino", the game is first recorded in 1792 in England[4] where it appears to have become something of a fashionable craze,[3] and certainly well known enough for Mrs. Scatter to declare "I do long for a game of Cassino" in Frederic Reynolds' 1797 comedy, Cheap Living.

[6][a] At that stage, the court cards had no numerical value and could only be paired, and there was no building; that did not appear in English rules until the second half of the century.

"[8] Initially the rules followed those in English sources, but as early as 1810, a markedly different variant appeared in which the court cards, Aces and Cassinos became far more potent.

"[10] Rules continued to be published in German until at least 1975,[11] but the game seems to have waned in Germany and Austria towards the end of the 19th century.

Royal Cassino is mentioned as early as 1894 when we learn that a passenger on a line from New York to London played the game with a doctor and his wife[12] but its rules first appear in English Foster's Complete Hoyle of 1897.

Zwickern, a north German variant, introduced up to 6 Jokers as special cards and grew so popular that bespoke packs were made for it.

Tablanette, another apparent variant in which the Kings, Queens, Knaves and Tens are also counters, appeared in the late 19th in a German source[14] and later featured in one of Hubert Phillips' games compendia in 1939.

The dealer deals four cards each and four to the table, placing the rest face down as the stock.

There are two teams of two and they follow Whist rules for cutting for places, dealing and scoring the games singly or double.

In 1864, William Brisbane Dick, alias "Trumps", published the first rules that included the feature of "building up", whereby players were allowed to place a card on an existing table card and, by announcing their combined value, fix the build at that value.

In 1867, however, Dick published an even more elaborate set of rules that included "calling" for the first time.

The rules were based on research that included testing and approval by "the best players in this city".

Twenty-one Point Cassino appears for the first time in print in Dick's 1880 Modern Pocket Hoyle where he says that "Cassino is now very generally played for a fixed number of points (usually twenty-one)".

Royal Cassino appears for the first time in Foster's Complete Hoyle (1897); however, the concept of giving values to the court cards was a Austro-German invention of the early 19th century.

This replaced the usual score for "most spades" and gave 24 points per hand, excluding sweeps.