Deck
The game of tarot is played using a 78-card tarot deck. This deck is composed of:
- 21 numbered trump cards (atouts),
- 1 Fool (l'Excuse), and
- 4 suits of 14 cards each;
- numbered "pip cards" from 1 to 10 (the "Ace" is always the lowest value and so is marked with its number 1 instead of the "A" common in 52-card decks), and
- four "face cards"; the Valet (Jack), Chevalier (Knight; not seen in 52-card decks), Dame (Queen) and Roi (King).
The tarot deck commonly used in cartomancy, the Rider-Waite, was derived from the original Tarot de Marseilles card designs and deck composition used for this game. In modern times, for ease of play, a deck style known as the "Tarot Nouveau" or "Bourgeois Tarot" is used to play the game. This deck, which began to appear around the turn of the last century, has card designs similar to the French styling of the "Anglo-American" 52-card Poker or Bridge decks, and replaces the traditional allegorical images of the atouts with depictions of typical turn-of-century French life and leisure.
Read more about this topic: Tarot (game)
Famous quotes containing the word deck:
“And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.... He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix.”
—William Gibson b. (1948)
“And every sea-god pays a gem,
Yearly out of his watery cell,
To deck great Neptune’s diadem.”
—Thomas Campion (1567–1620)