Depending on when you start counting, playing cards are somewhere between 500 and 1,000 years old. Over that time, the faces, colors, and suits used changed a lot before settling on what we have today – the iconic French hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Here we’ve traced the history of card suits back through time, from modern cards to the Middle Ages.
The French Suit Today
Before we get into the history, it helps to understand how playing cards look today. While regional variations still exist, the overwhelming majority of cards today opt for the French suit. It was the suit chosen by the British and, later, the Americans, so they’ve become dominant in media representation and gambling culture.
The French-suited deck is so popular that it has been digitally recreated hundreds of times, for inclusion in online games that simulate the action you’ll find at a card table. Offerings in the growing iGaming industry also frequently feature the French suit for their cards, including those dealt at real-life tables that get livestreamed online. All the big stream providers use it, from Quantum Blackjack hosted by Playtech to Infinite Blackjack from Evolution Gaming. Despite the variety available in live blackjack game selection, where each table has a different aesthetic and a new set of dealers, the French suit stays exactly the same. This is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as French cards are iconic, easily recognizable, and make for great and classy marketing symbols.
That said, the emergence of digital gambling spaces will create new opportunities to iterate on these existing card designs. As we’ll learn, playing card design changes the most when it’s filtered through different cultures and geographic regions. The same thing can happen in the digital space, with some communities already dedicated to reviving obscure suits that have fallen out of fashion.
How Card Suits Formed
With playing card suits, our oldest examples come from China during the 1100s. We call them money-suited cards because each suit was based on the currency at the time and how coins were arranged and exchanged in their society – coins, strings, myriads, and tens. Through contact with China, the Indo-Persian world seems to have adopted the practice of decorating cards with a suit system. This led to the Mamluk cards found at Topkapı Palace, one of the oldest card decks we have today, and widely considered a precursor to the modern suit system. This deck used coins, scimitar swords, polo sticks, and cups as suits instead.
As card games made their way westwards, these suits hit the Latin cultures of the Mediterranean. These European cultures made changes to the suit system. Curved scimitar swords got straightened out, to reflect European swordcraft, and polo sticks became clubs because polo wasn’t a popular sport in the region. This led to the first Latin suit – coins, swords, clubs, and cups.
After arriving in Europe, it was only a matter of time before inland regions like Germany, Switzerland, and France made their own versions. It started with the Swiss in the 1400s, who created a new suit system made from shields, roses, acorns, and bells instead. The Germans iterated on this, swapping the roses for hearts and the shields for leaves.
So, when the French finally got involved, they reinterpreted the German symbols into the ones we know today. The acorns became clovers, hearts stayed the same, leaves became pikes, and bells became tiles.
Then, when the English-speaking world started using them, it became more popular to refer to the clovers as clubs, the pikes as spades, and the tiles as diamonds. By the 1600s, the French suits were dominant in Western Europe. The British helped spread them across the world, to America and back to China, and they haven’t changed to this day.
