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Once in a while when I read pirate fiction, thepirates will be playing poker. This drives me absolutely mad, since the cardgame poker wasn't invented until about 1850 (roughly 150 years after the GoldenAge). It grew up along the Mississippi river boats, and then spread to theCalifornia gold fiends. It is a product of the American frontier.
In the early Caribbean, card games were certainlypopular, but they were games that had originated in Europe.
The cards themselves were very much like the oneswe use today. A deck held 52 cards, with the same four suits as our own, andthe number 1-10 in each, plus the 3 face cards of Jack Queen and King in eachsuit.
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What was not the same was the look of the cards.No one had yet thought of designing the cards so that they looked the same witheither end up. The royal figures had heads and feet, and the 'pip' cardslikewise had only one 'right' way up. The backs of the cards were blank, and the edges were not rounded in themanner of modern cards. Also, they were printed on plain cardboard, without thewaterproof coating we expect now. Cards were also much harder to come by. It'seasy to imagine them being dog-eared and dirty.
A lonely pirate might pass the time by playing Patience,which was the word used at the time for the game we call Solitaire. The versionat the time was the one most likely to be found today on a computer, anarrangement of cards that starts out with seven piles of face-down cards, andends with 4 piles, face up, each containing only one suit and arranged from aceto king.
The classic English game was Cribbage, in almostexactly the same form it is played today. It was descended from an even oldergame called 'Noddy'. Cribbage boards, the scoring mechanism for the game, havebeen found in the wrecks of pirate ships. Today cribbage is the 'official' gameof the American submarine service.
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Seafaring novels set during the Napoleonic wars (1799-1815)often mention the game Whist, a game similar to modern-day Bridge. But thisgame is believed to have come into being at about 1728 – too late for ourperiod.
France, a major player in the Caribbean, was alsoa major producer of playing cards. Produced a number of famous card games, includingPiquet (pronounced P.K.).
Piquet was developed at about the year 1500,possibly from an even older Spanish game. It uses a deck of 32 cards, from7-King in each of 4 suits, plus the Aces, which are high. It is a game for 2players, each of whom receives 12 cards, and can discard and re-draw to improvetheir hand. The game then progresses something like Bridge, with combinations beingmade to score points by 'taking tricks.'
This is a scientific game. It's possible to figureout exactly what cards your opponent holds by noting your own cards and your opponents'discards. Possibly because this led to over-confidence, betting sometimesreached fantastical heights. French nobles sometimes wagered whole estates on asingle game. Eventually the king of France banned Piquet, though play did notactually die out for another two centuries.
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This may also have been one of the reasons thatpirate ships banned card games except on shore.
The spiritual, if not quite factual, ancestor ofall these games was the Spanish Ombre. A complicated game, it was, like theothers, a trick-taking game similar to Bridge. Its name is derived from theofficial statement that one had won the game, similar to the exclamation 'Check!'in chess. It was actually the Spanish word 'hombre,' meaning 'I'm the man!'
Of course, there were dozens of other card games.The number of ways that a single deck of cards can be dealt, stacked, combined,spread and recombined in almost limitless variations. Where today we have avariety of card types (Uno, Go Fish, Old Maid) , in the early 1700's there wasonly one basically type of was only one type of deck. The variations were wideindeed.
While many card games required 'tricks' to be acquired, the Irish game Maw (sometimes rhymed with cow) was a game of discarding. The first person tolay all his cards on the table was the winner. It was, ideally, a five persongame.
Maw had one other interesting detail. It wasagainst the rules to tell the rules to any other player. The official statementwas, 'I can only tell you the first rule, and that's this one.' After that,players needed to figure it out for themselves. The appearance of certain cardsreversed the order of play, caused play to skip a player, changed the cardsthat were 'high' or made other changes. If a new player didn't figure it out hepayed a penalty.
So a tavern full of pirates playing cards wouldhave been a vibrant and loud affair. The cards would slap, the cribbage boardwould clack, arguments would break out over the rules of the various games, andevery once in while someone would clash his tankard to the table top and shout,'I'm the man!'
