I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. And playing with a cheap-but- durable deck is important your spiritualist or Wiccan friends are unlikely to surrender a prized deck to be battered and chafed in a card game. Card size and feel is an important issue, as with some games you could end up trying to manage over a dozen cards in your hands. Its imagery is simpler (making the cards easier to recognize in your hand) and the card size is closer to that of regular playing cards than many decks you can buy. The Rider-Waite deck is generally the least expensive Tarot Deck you can buy and is usually available in most bookstores. And for some people, the act of playing with something associated with the occult may give them a bit of a thrill.įor all of the card games mentioned below, if you want to play with a real Tarot deck instead of a special European tarocci deck (which won't be readily available in many places in North America anyway), I recommend the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. Why would you want to play games with Tarot cards? Well, for one the cards are more beautiful and interesting than regular ol' playing cards, and the game play is more complex and challenging. The joker is the only major arcana card to survive in the modern deck: it began as The Fool. Modern playing cards are really just the minor arcana under a different guise: knights and pages have been combined to become jacks, swords have become spades, staves have become clubs, cups have become hearts, and pentacles ( coins) have become diamonds. It makes sense that one can use Tarot cards for various games, since the 78-card Tarot deck is the ancestor of the modern 52-card playing deck (54 if you're using both jokers).

Two player tarot card games