Vanishing Card Games

Probably the same--it's the uniform.

The men in the first photograph are probably officers or non-commissioned officers--their hats have brims on them. The men in the second photograph are undoubtedly private soldiers--their hats have no brims. In the first photograph, i'd speculate that it might be 1915 or 1916. Two of them have medal ribbons in their button holes, which they would not have acquired in peace time. One of them is wearing puttees, which became favored due to trench warfare.

thanks boss

Sharply observed. I would agree.

Back the time B.C. (Before Children) the Lovely Bride and I would meet with
another couple and play hearts for hours on end. Once a summer we would
take a cruise around Lake Winnipesaukee on the Mt. Washington, drinking,
playing Hearts, and watching the shoreline go by. That was fun.

A vanished card game I first learned of from the Hornblower series: Whist.

I remember playing canasta when I was a kid (no idea how to play it now), plus gin rummy, 500 rummy and a lot of double solitaire and a variant called touch. I'm pretty sure my brother still remembers how to play touch, dunno if he's taught it to the elder nephew. It's hard to find anything on touch online as a lot of search results are about the iPod touch.

I also recall learning matching by playing concentration.

Seaglass and I play Rummy all the time (when we're not playing Scrabble). When I was teaching at that detention center for our wayward youth, the big card game among the resident inmates was Spades, which is just Hearts with the suits switched around. They all believed that the game had been invented in a prison; that's why they loved it.

The game popular among American blacks which they call "bid whizz" is virtually indistinguishable from whist. I believe that one of those rich dudes, John Jacob Astor perhaps (i look around) invented contract bridge by modifying whist.

I beg to differ . . . spades and hearts are considerably different than is implied by simply switching the suits around.

You could be right. I don't play either, so that was just the impression I had.

Here we go, from Wikipedia: "The modern game of contract bridge was the result of innovations to the scoring of auction bridge made by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt and others." It earlier observed that auction bridge was developed from whist.

In hearts, the object is either to take all the hearts (which gives each of the other player 26 points), or to take none of them. Those are ideals, and usually, you're doing well if you take as few hearts as possible. The "Bitch," the Queen of Spades, is worth 13 points, and each heart is worth one point. As soon as one player gets over 69 points, or 100 points (it varies regionally), the game is over and the player with the lowest score has won.

Spades, however, is a pretty standard trick-taking game, but spades are always the trump suit.

I think it was a Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies where he played Whist for money

from the American Contract Bridge League:

jespah

yup

sorry about the Redundancy Department Of Redundancy set...I missed your post

By the way, although the name Hoyle is now copyright protected for books of rules of card games, and for a brand of playing cards, the original Hoyle was a man who wrote a treatise on the game of whist in the 17th century. I used to possess a facsimile copy. It grew legs once upon a time, and i've not seen it in 20 years. I understand, though, that he became popular enough with his rules for whist that he wrote rules for other games. Obviously, that is the origin of "according to Hoyle."

I occasionally play spades and hearts online.

I knew you could play hearts online, but i didn't know about spades. Is it real time against other putative humans?

yes....yahoo games has had spades games for many years.

Bridge Basic Online, a fine bridge site even has bots(robots) if you don't care to play with humans