Design theory: Poker pattern design

The translator's words : Talking about playing cards , or our Chinese ancestors invented, and later passed to Europe through the Islamic countries. Over the years, the pattern and design of poker has always been closely related to the times, we can in the past playing cards in a glimpse of previous historical features. Wherever it can be printed, there is a foothold in art, playing cards is no exception. Over the past hundreds of years, poker has also produced a lot of features of the pattern, to the modern times, spades and other patterns only gradually unified. The history of playing cards is also a cultural history of mankind.

Like a perfect storm, a few things have happened lately that have caused me to write this article. First, a few months ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the new humanity that began to play the nostalgic wind, the Canasta card game (a card game at the time, with two cards to play together.) and other poker games are starting to take off, and they are trying to go back to the age of innocence through this card game, where entertainment doesn't require a memory chip or a VCD player. The second thing is that the Celebrity Poker Challenge (Celebrity poker), which is very lively on the Bravo website, continues to be hot, with the participation of a number of actors in the White House elite (West Wing). And the last thing I bought in a thrift store was nearly 1000 cards in 40-50 years, so as a double victim of pop culture and nostalgic culture, I had no choice but to settle down and study the cards and explore the stories behind them.

One of the biggest benefits of buying someone else's collection is that you will find that you may not be able to collect so many things for 1 million years if you want to collect them yourself. For example, there are more than 30 cards in the cards that are bought from the thrift store, and some of the cards are very good. I also spent 5 dollars to buy a box of cards of the size of a shoebox, and it was clear that the box was supposed to be a young woman, because the designs were on horseback, ballet women and some pets. There are some poker backs that say when the cards were bought back. There are some cards that are not right, so I think it may be that children often lose their parents ' cards to play with themselves.

Figure 1 Poker bought at thrift stores--I can't believe I could have them someday.

Like things that were popular in the past, poker has produced some specialized printing companies and has driven printing companies to print cards with smooth, rounded and flaky effects. And because of the development of printing technology, so that poker from the public more and more near, when the era of playing poker, of course, earlier than the era of letterpress printing.

I started my visit to poker by learning about the Complete card game, and I read an authoritative book called the latest game of cards, the new Hoyle, which contains almost all the playing cards. But I am disappointed, Edmund. Holi (Edmond Hoyle) died in 1769, and he wrote only five popular games, and the introductions were not detailed. From that point on, every "card game" (Hoyle, and also the meaning of a card game) was theoretically incomplete, although Holi's name was printed on the cover of every card game book. The end result is that there is no card game book of the so-called "final".

While this somewhat shook my confidence, I was convinced that the Kester card game began in Uruguay in the second century, and that in the 40 's the game soon passed to the United States. By the year 1951, according to the information I found, it was the most popular game of all time. The word "kester" means "basket" in Spanish, because a basket is placed in the center of the table in the middle of the game to play cards that are not played by those who play cards. This doesn't require any special "Kester" poker--it's just a combination of two cards, each with 52 copies. Because the game was so popular at the time, there were some very special poker design patterns.

Fig. 2 The early 50 's was the most popular game in the United States, and most of the poker designs were in Spanish.

Fig. 3 The design pattern of poker is more and more rich. Poker design also reached its peak in the 50 's, when playing Solitaire was still popular, while the advertisement did not use playing cards as a media of publicity.