Re: Proposal to encode dominoes and other game symbols

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 13:18:58 CDT

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    From: "Eric Muller" <emuller@adobe.com>
    > Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > >A suggestion for playaing cards: why not including the "Tarots"?
    > >I mean in French the 4 "Cavaliers" figures, the 18 "Atouts", and the "Excuse"
    > >(which is not exactly a Joker); sorry I don't have their English names.
    > >
    > Make that 21 atouts (labeled "1" through "21"), for a total of 78 cards.
    > The "cavalier" is between the jack and the queen. Very popular game in
    > high school and college in my days.

    This was a typo when I initially typed 78 decks and just replacing it by 21 when
    chaznging the sentence.
    I play this game, very popular in France (with an official French Federation
    organizing competitions). The Atouts (1 OK) have 2 "Bouts" or "oudlers" (1 and
    21), the third bout or oudler being the Excuse (that some think is a variant of
    the Joker).
    Because there are more decks in your hand, these decks are naturally longer so
    that you can look at them easily.

    Some say this is a complex game, but my 6-years old daughter also plays this
    game at school where she learned it. On the opposite I've never been able to
    understand out to play bridge... Tarots are so beautiful and finally fun with
    its unique system for counting points, and the many options it gives to you when
    choosing your contract.

    Note: The English name of "Cavalier" is a "Knight" of course. I was not sure of
    it before I looked at the official site of the French Federation of Tarot.

    As a note: old Tarots use other "colors" than the modern ones used in official
    competitions (Heart, Spider, Square, ...). Official Atout decks also are NOT
    named like Old Tarots (only numbered). Old tarots use other symbols for the 4
    families, and Atouts are not always numbered, but consistently use the esoteric
    symbolism (Death, Emperor, ...).
    All this is to be considered, for Unicode, to be considered an glyphic variant.
    For esoteric uses, there's little use of plain text encoding, because the symbol
    is more important than the value of the deck. This is very different from decks
    used for official game rules.



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