French-suited playing cards
In a standard 52-card deck these are the valet (knave or jack), the dame (lady or queen), and the roi (king).
In comparison to Spanish, Italian, German, and Swiss playing cards, French cards are the most widespread due to the geopolitical, commercial, and cultural influence of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The French suited pack has spawned many regional variations known as standard patterns based on their artwork and deck size.
All cards were produced on watermarked paper made by the state to show payment of the stamp tax.
The French have a unique habit of associating their face cards with historical or mythical personages which survives only in the portrait officiel.
The Belgian-Genoese pattern is very similar to its Parisian parent and is basically an export version not subject to France's domestic stamp tax.
[4][5] Hence they lack the usual French court card names such as Alexander, Judith and Lancelot.
Other differences from the portrait officiel are that: the jack of clubs has a triangular shield bearing the coat of arms of the former Spanish Netherlands (this is the main distinguishing feature); blue is usually replaced with green in the portraits and the diagonal dividing line lacks the beads.
The Piedmontese pattern is similar to the Genoese packs but its face cards have a horizontal instead of diagonal dividing line and the aces are found in a decorative garland.
A 78-card tarot version of the Piedmontese pattern, complete with knights, the fool, a suit of trumps depicting flowers, and corner indices, was printed in 1902 for Savoyard players.
The Chambéry rules that come with the deck are similar to Piedmontese tarot games but the ace ranked between the jack and the 10 like in Triomphe.
A Parisian variant appeared in Bavaria in the mid-18th century where the king of diamonds wore a turban.
The Russian pattern created during the early 19th-century is based on a Baltic version of a Bavarian derivative.
Adler-Cego is the last remaining animal tarot and is used in Germany's Black Forest to play Cego.
The Industrie und Glück ("Diligence and Fortune") tarock deck of Central Europe uses Roman numerals for the trumps.
Its trumps feature a newer pattern of more mundane scenes, such as depictions of rural life, than the traditional allegorical motifs found in Italian tarocchi decks.
Early examples were made by Suhr (1814–28) in Hamburg itself, while other manufacturers of the pattern were based elsewhere in the German Empire, in Austria, Belgium, France, Sweden and Switzerland.
The jack ranking higher than the queen comes from the older Portuguese-suited games where a female knave was outranked by the knight.
They have fallen out of popularity in Germany but are very common in Poland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Baltic states.
It is an amalgam of the original Dondorf and revised Swedish designs with the court indices numbered from 11 to 13.
It is popular in Francophone Europe and Quebec and is also used in Denmark to play tarot games that require the full 78-card deck.
Like the Industrie und Glück, the trumps depict genre scenes but modern editions use Arabic numerals instead of Roman ones.
The clothing for the figures in the court cards are color coordinated; green for spades, red for hearts, purple for clubs, and blue for diamonds.
English cardmakers produced lower-quality cards than their continental counterparts leading to the loss of detail from the Rouennais pattern.
One deck invented in the United States but more commonly found in Australia and New Zealand contains 11s, 12s, and red 13s to play the six-handed version of the Euchre variant 500.
The Lombard decks exported to Swiss Italian regions contain corner indices and also labels the ranks of the face cards.
The Tuscan or Florentine pattern, dating from the mid-19th century, is the only French-suited deck that is not reversible in the present.
Dondorf of Frankfurt produced this pattern around 1900 and, today, it is used in Patience decks by many companies worldwide.
The court cards are dressed in rococo period costumes and wear powdered wigs.
[67][68] Since 1914, Piatnik have produced a derivative pattern for several of their patience packs that are referred to as Rococo playing cards.
