Playing cards likely began with Tang-dynasty woodblock print
Card games exploit faces you can see and backs you cannot, so hidden information drives play. A Tang-era ninth-century Chinese context—woodblock printing and a Duyang miscellany text—likely incubated playing cards. Boards sometimes appear, yet the genre still hinges on card decisions more than board geography.
Some card games use traditional decks, others proprietary ones, and most are folk games whose rules shift by region or even by circle of friends; only a handful have standardised rules and international tournaments. Every player knows what a deck contains, and several decks can be shuffled into one pack or shoe. Modern games with bespoke decks full of number and action cards are usually lumped in with the board game hobby.
Since each player sees only their own cards, card games are classed as games of imperfect information, unlike games such as chess where the whole position is visible to everyone. When a card game has a board, it mostly guides scoring or placement; board games that use cards reverse the emphasis, focusing on where players stand.
Su E's ninth-century Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang mentions Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong, playing a leaf game with her husband's relatives in 868, though whether it used cards is uncertain. The Song scholar Ouyang Xiu dated the leaf game to at least the mid-Tang period but also said the leaves were book pages for a dice board game whose rules were lost by 1067. The first firmly dated card play came on 17 July 1294, when Yuan officials arrested two gamblers with paper cards and seized nine cards and the printing blocks. Tang and later drinking games used cards bearing forfeits instead of suits, such as one ordering the drawer to beg food from guests and then boast.
Europe's first mention is a Catalan rhyming dictionary of 1371, perhaps reflecting trade with Mamluk Egypt. A 1408 document describes two card sharps' unnamed game, and Karnöffel, first recorded in 1426, is the earliest game known by name and survives in forms like Bruus and Kaiserspiel.
Source: Card game
