There is already excellent coverage of Bridge and Poker on these pages, so let's have a look at some of the other card games which are popular around the world ...

The best place on the Web to find information about lots of different card games is this Card Games Web site, maintained by John McLeod. This is a really wonderful site with rules, history and links for hundreds of card games from all over the world. If you want to know the rules of any of the games that I have mentioned here, then John's site is the place to look. I am very grateful to John for his helpful comments on this article, which have helped me to eliminate some errors, and have provided some extra information.

Some of the games described below are played with the standard 52-card pack with the (originally French) standard suits of clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. Others are played with the 32-card deck, which is formed by removing the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of each suit. Yet others are played with different sets of cards, including some played with Tarot cards.

Traditional games of Spanish origin are usually played with a 40-card deck. This has four suits, each containing numbered cards from 1 to 7 plus three court cards (equivalent to the jack, queen and king in the standard deck). However, Spanish cards are often sold as a 48-card pack which also has 8s and 9s, but these are not used for most games. Games like L'Hombre and Cuaranta which were originally played with the Spanish 40-card deck are now usually played with standard cards leaving out the 8, 9 and 10 of each suit.

Incidentally, the suits appearing on traditional packs of cards vary from country to country. In Germany the suits are acorns, leaves, hearts and bells. Spain and Italy use swords, batons, cups and coins and in Switzerland there are shields, flowers, bells and acorns. Cards with Spanish suits are used all over Spain and in South America. Italian suits are used in the south and north-east of Italy, and Swiss suits in the eastern cantons of Switzerland. German suits are found not only in the south and south-east of Germany, but also in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia.