Customer Reviews

The A-Z of Card Games (Oxford Paperback Reference)

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If you like cards, this book is a great choice. It lists several hundred card games in alphabetical order. These include both popular and obscure games from all over the world. Each entry offers clear, easy-to-understand rules for the game.

This is the 2nd edition of the book entitled "A Dictionary of Card Games" written in the early 1990s by the same author. Since I have a copy of the older edition, I wondered whether buying this new edition would be worth it. I can report that it definitely was. This updated edition adds some new international games, from countries such as China and Vietnam, that have not before been published in English.

As a card hobbyist, I've bought a dozen or so books on card games. One of the few as good as this is from the same author, entitled "Penguin Encyclopedia of Card Games." That book organizes games by type, whereas this one lists them alphabetically.

You can't go wrong by buying either book (or just get both!). May all your deals be happy.

David Parlett's The A-Z of Card Games, published in Oxford Paperback Reference series, is the best compilation of card game rules I've ever seen, at least in book format. The book is full of interesting games from all around the world - the book has some Finnish games, too! It's an intelligent book and takes card games seriously, unlike many other rule books that seem to be written on autopilot.

Parlett's book passes even the hardest test: it includes few games played with the Tarot pack. That's something fairly rare and always a sign of a good book. This book isn't perfect, though: there are some errors in the rules, but fortunately those are fairly rare. Parlett's style isn't probably the easiest, so I'd recommend this book to people who already know how to play card games and want to learn new, interesting games. This isn't the best first book for card game newbies.

This book really is very accessible, and contains many interesting games - the tone is pretty chatty, which makes it much easier to learn from than the Hoyle or Jacoby books, and the illustrations are very clear (why couldn't Hoyle have done this?). Also, there is a lot of information on some of the newer games (Chinese Poker, President, Gopa, and Eleusis, for example) that for some reason are absent in other collections. Also, I appreciate that Parlett's language is so colloquial, since so many other collections of rules have a 1940's academic feel to them - ironic since they discuss social gaming!

All that said, there are some serious omissions here. I've only had the book for a day, but found some oversights that must be mentioned to balance out the other reviews. Firstly, there is no index. This is pretty inexcusable in a reference book - it may be pointed out that the games are alphabetically listed, but what if I want to look up "Italy" and see what games came from there? Or find out which games are trick taking games? Can't be done.

Also, game specific here, in his description of Chinese Poker, Parlett says "There is no strategy, no vying, no sense in it at all" (p.86). While the smarmy tone might entertain other folks who have obviously never played the game, not only is there strategy, there is a book about it with full mathematical analysis (not available on amazon, but easily found with a search engine). In his description of Canasta, the author makes the following absolutely baffling statement: "If you throw a wild card, you should place it sideways across the pack so as to project from it when subsequent discards are made. This shows that the pack is frozen." (p. 72). What? That makes virtually no sense to anyone who doesn't play the game, presumably, anyone reading the rules for it. By the way, he never defines the term 'frozen' beyond that description.

I found these faults after a day, so I'm sure there are more.

With that said, this is a good supplement to other rule books. Again, the chatty tone helps more often than not, and it contains a lot of newer games. Just make sure you have Hoyle as a backup, possibly to clarify some of the foggy or missing information here.