Playing card suit
A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called jokers.
The concept of suits predates playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as Tien Gow.
Chinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit system.
By then the Islamic world had spread into Central Asia and had contacted China, and had adopted playing cards.
[3] Another clue linking these Chinese, Muslim, and European cards are the ranking of certain suits.
In many early Chinese games like Madiao, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones.
The inverting of suits had no purpose in terms of play but was an artifact from the earliest games.
These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, used the suits coins, clubs, cups, and swords, but the clubs represented polo sticks; Europeans changed that suit, as polo was an obscure sport to them.
They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, and were adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s.
Despite a long history of trade with China, Japan was not introduced to playing cards until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s.
[c] Early locally made cards, Karuta, were very similar to Portuguese decks.
Increasing restrictions by the Tokugawa shogunate on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the Hanafuda deck that today is used most often for fishing-type games and the Komatsufuda and Kabufuda decks that are used for gambling.
[13] Always included in tarot decks is one card, the Fool or Excuse, which may be part of the trump suit depending on the game or region.
A few Sicilian towns use the Portuguese-suited Tarocco Siciliano, the only deck of its kind left in Europe.
[14][15] In divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot, the Minor Arcana, and the suits by extension, are believed to represent relatively mundane features of life.
The chosen suits are typified by having a disrupted ranking and cards with varying privileges which may range from full to none and which may depend on the order they are played to the trick.
An example of this is in auction games such as bridge, where if one player wishes to bid to make some number of heart tricks and another to make the same number of diamond tricks, there must be a mechanism to determine which takes precedence in the bidding order.
In bridge, such decks are known as no-revoke decks, and the most common colors are black spades, red hearts, blue diamonds and green clubs, although in the past the diamond suit usually appeared in a golden yellow-orange.
This is a compromise deck devised to allow players from East Germany (who used German suits) and West Germany (who adopted the French suits) to be comfortable with the same deck when playing tournament Skat after the German reunification.
Card suit symbols occur in places outside card playing: In computer and other digital media, suit symbols can be represented with character encoding, notably in the ISO and Unicode standards, or with Web standard (SGML's named entity syntax): Unicode is the most frequently used encoding standard, and suits are in the Miscellaneous Symbols Block (2600–26FF) of the Unicode.
