There are four types of Latin suits: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and an extinct archaic type. The inverting of suits had no purpose in regards to gameplay 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 Mamluk suit of swords may also have been inspired by the Chinese numeral for Ten (十). The Mamluks called their suit of cups Myriads and this may have been due to inverting the Chinese character for myriad (万). A string of coins could easily be misinterpreted as a stick to those unfamiliar with them. 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, and Tens of Myriads. A card of one suit cannot beat a card from another regardless of its rank.Ĭhinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit-system. The earliest card games were trick-taking games and the invention of suits increased the level of strategy and depth in these games. Ultimately the suits can trace their roots back to China where playing cards were first invented. Europeans change that suit as polo was an obscure sport to them.

These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, employed the same suits but the clubs represented polo-sticks. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, having been adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. Latin suits consists of coins, clubs, cups, and swords.

Poker spade value