What were the earliest card games?
As with questions about the origins of playing cards, this question cannot be answered with certainty. In fact the situation is more uncertain for the games than for the cards they were played with. Although a few packs of very early playing-cards survive there is practically no European literature giving detailed descriptions of how to play any card games before the 17th century, some 250 years after their introduction into Europe. We can therefore only rely on fragmentary references, and reconstructions based on later games. It seems likely that the earliest European card games included trick taking games without trumps and hand comparison games. Trumps were introduced in the fifteenth century. The earliest known games with trumps are Karnöffel and Tarot (which was originally known as Trionfi).
