Re: The rules of tarot

12
R.A. Hendley wrote:
SteveM wrote:
...not only with Latin suits but with French suits too.

Interesting. I never knew this applied to the French suits. Is it the Hearts & Diamonds that are Ace high?
In games where the rule is applied, the red pips of the french suits as short suits of latin, black suits as long.

(This rule can be found applied to the pip cards of several old card games, not just the pip cards of the tarot.)

Re: The rules of tarot

13
Huck wrote: The old expression for ONE card deck is "paro" ... pairs (not only in Italy). For the "established playing card culture" of the later time this meaning wasn't interesting. A playing card deck had 4 suits ... though in two colors (black and red, rouge and noir, and PAIR and IMPAIR ... in roulette ... .-) )
:) %%-

I'm very intrigued with this "paro" long time ago. It's a good hypothesis. Thanks Huck.
When a man has a theory // Can’t keep his mind on nothing else (By Ross)

Re: The rules of tarot

14
Hello,
this is not extremely important, but regarding the following :
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:Deep apologies - the earliest French rules of 1637 do observe the reverse ordering of Coins and Cups.

This is the only evidence of it though, and by the 1659 rules all the suits had the same order of rank, Ace low, Ten high.
I just remembered this discussion this morning and remembered that this is not the only evidence since 1637, even though the probably incomplete 1659 rule does not mention it. The Tarot de Rouen by Adam de Hautot (sometime around 1730) reads on the two of cups the same rule
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pour conoistre que la plus basse de deniers et de coupe enporte les plus haute quand pour le fait du jeu
to know that the lowest of Deniers and of Cups wins over the highest regarding the game
Moreover at the end of the XVIIIth century, in the "Règle du jeu de Tarocs comme on le joue vulgairement à Annecy", which - although from Annecy under heavy Swiss and Italian influence - reads in french
tout ce qu'il y a c'est que dans les coupes et les deniers l'as prend le 2, le 2 prend le trois, le trois prend le quatre, ainsi de suite en montant jusqu'au 10, au lieu que dans les épées et bâtons c'est l'inverse
all there is is that in cups and deniers the As takes the 2, the 2 takes the three, the three takes the four and so on up to the 10, and the opposite in the épées and bâtons
It is worth noting that the Annecy rule also follows piedmontese rule where the 20 trumps the 21 so it is proably a translation from the italian rule. But at a close time in an opposite corner of France - Rouen - the cups and deniers were sorted in the inverted order too, so I think the cups and deniers inverted order might have lasted longer than what the 1659 rule may lead us to think - at least in certain region of France.

Saludos, see you in a few weeks !

Bertrand

Re: The rules of tarot

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In Doppelkopf - nowadays, not in old times - the game is in practice played in slight variations, probably there are 100s of different way to play it. If you play with foreign persons, you first have to set up some talking according which rules "now" should be played, which might take a few minutes.
Skat, which had as Doppelkopf its likely origin in begin of 19th century, has far more fixed rules. The simple reason: it became far earlier a tournament game. Both are relative complex games with many specialities (so "much rules"), somehow comparable to Tarot. This formed a centralization of the game Skat and this formed the situation, that rules differences are somehow "important" ... but actually they aren't for the practice of a game. Playing in earlier centuries had far less chances to centralize rules (to which somehow belongs, that rules were written in books and that these books were really read and cared about), so rules variations should have been "normal" and nothing to bother about.

Players are anarchists ... :-) ... they do, what they like, and don't care for the problems of Tarot historians.

For Doppelkopf, there had formed in the 1980's a Doppelkopf-Verband, and this attempts since then with not too much success to centralize the game on "their version" ... I personally observed the beginning of this movement. The usual Doppelkopfplayer doesn't care too much about their existence ....-) ... that's good so.

Well, a new modern factor of rules centralization is, that games are played "online", necessarily according "rules of specific versions".
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The rules of tarot

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Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:Deep apologies - the earliest French rules of 1637 do observe the reverse ordering of Coins and Cups.

This is the only evidence of it though, and by the 1659 rules all the suits had the same order of rank, Ace low, Ten high.
As a matter of interest, this order is still retained in some tarot games.

Re: The rules of tarot

17
dr bartolo wrote:
Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote:Deep apologies - the earliest French rules of 1637 do observe the reverse ordering of Coins and Cups.

This is the only evidence of it though, and by the 1659 rules all the suits had the same order of rank, Ace low, Ten high.
As a matter of interest, this order is still retained in some tarot games.
Yes, of course. According to Dummett and McLeod (History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack, p. 4), who call it the "original ranking", only France and Sicily observe the "simplified" rule of Ace low, Ten high in every suit.

Everywhere else the game was played, including Piedmont, the original ranking was observed.
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Re: The rules of tarot

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This reversed ranking, as a matter of interest, is why the german "tarock" pack retained only the ace, 2,3,4 in the red suits, and 7,8,9,10 in the black suits. so, you'd end up with a deck of 54 cards, the trumps and courts unchanged.
I think the reason why this was so was the players got bored with 40 pip cards, and so, reduced the number to 16.....

But, the earliest tarock deck I know of , by Franz Xavier Milchram, the "grazer tarock" (1825) has the ranking of 7,8,9 ,10 in
all suits, plus a ace of hearts and a ace of diamonds! (so as to bringthe number of cards to 56 and make it more divisible amongst 4 players, perhaps?)

Re: The rules of tarot

19
dr bartolo wrote:This reversed ranking, as a matter of interest, is why the german "tarock" pack retained only the ace, 2,3,4 in the red suits, and 7,8,9,10 in the black suits. so, you'd end up with a deck of 54 cards, the trumps and courts unchanged.
I think the reason why this was so was the players got bored with 40 pip cards, and so, reduced the number to 16.....

But, the earliest tarock deck I know of , by Franz Xavier Milchram, the "grazer tarock" (1825) has the ranking of 7,8,9 ,10 in
all suits, plus a ace of hearts and a ace of diamonds! (so as to bringthe number of cards to 56 and make it more divisible amongst 4 players, perhaps?)
Tarock is much older than 1825. Goethe in Werther's Leyden (1774) had his major figure playing Tarock. Printer Breithaupt (Leipzig), who later wrote about playing cards (1784), had bought a playing card fabric in 1771 ... Goethe as young man had close contact to his family, the Breithaupt sons were his friends.
http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks06/d04357/d04357.htm
Tarock rule books go back to c. 1750.
Trionfi decks should have reached Austria with Bianca Maria Sforza (Queen of the Empire) in 1494. She was very addicted to playing cards.

The Milchram deck with two additional aces ..
http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/decks08/d06686/d06686.htm
.. might be special for Graz or Steiermark. The description of the reproduction says (p. 6), that the original deck had (likely) an additional rule-book or rule-paper.

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Fool
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Pagat
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The additional aces look not very remarkable.
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The description says, that the deck is the oldest Veduten-Tarock (Tarock with scenes or buildings of a locality).
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... however, I saw a deck called Veduten Tarock of 1819
http://www.tarock.net/veduten.htm
Huck
http://trionfi.com