These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, used the suits coins, clubs, cups, and swords, but the clubs represented polo sticks Europeans changed that suit, as polo was an obscure sport to them. The inverting of suits had no purpose in terms of play but was an artifact from the earliest games. This was also true for the European games of Tarot and Ombre. In the Indo-Persian game of Ganjifa, half the suits were also inverted, including a suit of coins. In many early Chinese games like Madiao, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones. Another clue linking these Chinese, Muslim, and European cards are the ranking of certain suits. The Chinese numeral character for Ten ( 十) on the Tens of Myriads suit may have inspired the Muslim suit of swords. The Muslims renamed the suit of myriads as cups this may have been due to seeing a Chinese character for 'myriad' ( 万) upside-down. A string of coins could easily be misinterpreted as a stick to those unfamiliar with them.īy then the Islamic world had spread into Central Asia and had contacted China, and had adopted playing cards. Old Chinese coins had holes in the middle to allow them to be strung together. The money-suit system is based on denominations of currency: Coins, Strings of Coins, Myriads of Strings (or of coins), and Tens of Myriads. The concept of suits predate playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as Tien Gow.Ĭhinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit-system. A card of one suit cannot beat a card from another regardless of its rank.

The earliest card games were trick-taking games and the invention of suits increased the level of strategy and depth in these games. Main articles: Spanish-suited playing cards and Italian playing cards

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