About

Why?

As Alan Ferg says in Playing Cards of the Apaches (p. 35):

In the introductory remarks to her encyclopedic All Cards on theTable, renowned card historian Sylvia Mann talked about researching playing cards as “a limitless source of instruction and pleasure,” her “way into history.” She remarked (1990:Vol. I:9, 10), “Personally, I have acquired, through application and countless reference works and the talents of other collectors, some knowledge about a lot of subjects hitherto outside my interests…” This was equally true for the Waylands for four decades, and then for me, too. We pursued with enthusiasm a host of “peripheral” topics to ensure a complete understanding of the context of card playing in the New World: Copey trees, paper-making in Mexico, laws prohibiting gambling, how to prepare rawhide, the New World origin of Monte, how to date beads and buttons, the history of clothing in northern Mexico, Native American painting techniques and preparation of pigments, World’s Fairs, Papago place names, scanning electron microscope examinations of stubs of hairs on cards, archaeological excavations in New Mexico, Araucanian painted guanaco-hide cloaks from Chile, Santa Anita Race Track, John Wayne movies, and thumbnail sketches of a seemingly endless list of museum curators and U.S. Army personnel.

I was somewhat inspired by (but make no claim to approaching) W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn; games are a foothold for climbing inside other cultures and other times.

In order to form a just estimation of the character of any particular people, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the sports and pastimes most generally prevalent among them.

A revolution can destroy cathedrals, but I cannot see how it will deter children from playing with marbles.

Perhaps I am best aligned with Thomas Hyde:

Special thanks

… is due to:

• Marcus Richert, without whom most of the information about Japanese cards would not exist

A note on languages…

Where possible I have tried to supply terms in their original languages, in preference to the romanized forms found in most books. The main reason for doing this is that it’s possible to search using the original terms and find references from the people who are actually playing these games.

However, since I am not fluent in any language other than English, this has been difficult. If you have any corrections to supply then I am happy to update them.

Another reason is that romanization schemes change over time, so as time passes it is increasingly hard to recover the original form. Using the original terms where possible helps with this problem.

Copyright

Unless otherwise noted, all content on this site, including all images, is under my copyright (George Pollard). This content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA). This means that you may reuse the content, but you must credit me as the author, you may not charge money for your derivative work, and your work must be released under the same license.

Any content that is not created by me has its copyright status or license noted on it (and in metadata on the page, where possible). Please check these licenses before reusing any of this material, to confirm that you are complying with their terms.

The favicon is by Freepik from www.flaticon.com, and is licensed under CC 3.0 BY.

Colophon

The site is generated by a monolithic Rust executable (available on GitHub).

The main font used is Adobe’s Source Serif 4, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Charis SIL (also licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1) is used as a fallback for some rarer characters (e.g. mediævalist abbreviations), as it is very similar in design to Source Serif.

UniHentaiKana is used as a fallback font for hentaigana characters. It is licensed under the IPA Font License.

BabelStone Commons by Andrew West is used to indicate licensing information. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The playing-card font is a custom one that is based upon Chris Aguilar’s open source Vector Playing Cards, which are licensed under the LGPL 3.0. My modifications are also licensed under the same license.

Noto Naksh is used for Arabic and Persian and other related scripts. Noto Sans Balinese is used for Balinese script. Both are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

For Ancient Egyptian, Microsoft’s Egyptian OpenType font with quadrat support is used. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The chess-piece font is NKS30 by Umihotaru. It is a commercial font.

The inline SVG dice images were made by me using NKS02 by Umihotaru.

The font used for other emoji not covered by fonts mentioned above is Noto Emoji, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The font used for ISBN numbers is OCR-B produced by Matthew Skala, and released under GPL version 3 (with an exception for using the font in documents).