Playing Cards: A Cultural Ace

An eclectic set of objects with seemingly no obvious relation to each other: diamonds, hearts, spades, and clubs. However, these four suits are inextricably bound in our cultural gaming language — but why? 

The standard French-suited 52-card deck (plus perhaps a few jokers sprinkled in) has become a ubiquitous piece of culture, from playing a relaxed game of blackjack with your academic family to a high-stakes poker game in Las Vegas. Wherever one turns, there appears to be no refuge from these cards; hundreds of games, both digital and physical, beckon us to spend our time (or worse, money) dealing, shuffling, and playing hands. Perhaps the most novel of these games, Balatro — Latin for jester — is guilty of draining my time with its rather dangerous concoction of hypnotic visuals, card-manipulating gameplay, and addicting score calculations as chips exponentially increase. However, to understand why playing cards are ever-present, we must first look at their origin.

As this is not an article in the St Andrews Historical Journal, I won’t dwell excessively on the history of playing cards, yet one simple factor has led to worldwide appeal, one rather obvious. The humble playing card has embarked on a transmigrational journey, from traces of playing cards in ninth and tenth-century China to merchants bringing cards back from the Mamluk Sultanate to Europe. Naturally, playing cards, having travelled across nearly half the globe, experienced divergent evolutions. The Latin deck, most faithful to the Mamluk decks, featured suits of clubs, coins, cups, and swords. Eventually, manufacturers strove to create new combinations of suits, and ended up throwing some slightly odd choices into their decks, such as acorns — less deadly than clubs or swords and much less an indication of wealth than golden chalices or coins. French manufacturers, using stencil painting for cheap and relatively quick reproduction, settled on the aforementioned suits most familiar to a Western audience: diamonds, hearts, spades, and clubs. The simplified design of these suits lended themselves well to stencils, and thus the French deck became especially prominent. 

Of course, the question remains of why cards are so popular. Why have they not faded into obscurity following their initial introduction? What stops humanity from leaving the deck of cards to gather dust? Perhaps it’s the two-tone colours of the French suits; the elegant black complimenting the indulgent red especially well. Perhaps it’s the esoteric, magical associations we hold against them, especially when one looks at a tarot deck. Interestingly, some historians argue that the various suits are representative of feudal society, i.e. the hearts representing the clergy or the modest acorn indicative of the peasantry. This symbolism is thus anachronistic, and cards serve as miniature portals in which we can see a bygone era of monarchies and knaves. Perhaps, even, it’s the mathematical allure of card games; whether it be card counting or game theory, there’s something about these that intrigues our inner number crunchers. 

Yet there remains one reason for the popularity of cards, which trumps (no pun intended) all others I’ve suggested. They exist in a continual loop of reinvention. Their pre-existing familiarity and versatility lend themselves well to a seemingly infinite number of games, all with their limitless house rules. Even outside the standard 52-card deck, cards are the ultimate blank slate, a medium to do as one pleases. Cards of various types form the lifeblood of many a board game and carry out sporting penalties in hues of red and yellow. Games of all types involve cards, and thus cards are embedded deep within our collective cultural consciousness as part of our perpetual mission to vanquish boredom and ennui. And, in this collective consciousness, cards become a unifying language; nothing can bring people together quite like a card game can.

Illustration by Holly Ward