Penguin Book Of Card Games

Oddly enough, despite dating to 1979 in its initial edition, this book is more or less the dead tree version of the Pagat card game website. Comprehensive, wide-ranging, and dryly humorous, "The Penguin Book of Card Games" covers a wide range of card games from around the world, or at least those that can be played with a standard deck or some variant thereof. (Japanese, Korean, and Indian games, unfortunately, get short shrift, but the Chinese get a bit of attention as the inventors of playing cards in the first place.) It's actually somewhat unfortunate that this isn't a commonly available book, as it really does belong on the shelf next to Hoyle/Morehead and Scarne. There's a fair amount of historical information involved, including the medieval German game of Karnöffel and the original 20-card Mississippi riverboat version of Poker. Parlett also injects a distinctly British sense of snark, inserting surprise asides to break up what would otherwise be a book with a rather tedious Edith Hamiltonesque tone (Parlett's comment on strip poker: "It is difficult to tell who has won, and why."). Since it tries to be descriptive more than prescriptive, it also doesn't shy away from presenting games such as (ahem) "President" that Hoyle/Morehead studiously avoid, whether because of the name or the somewhat sub rosa nature of the game (in the case of the latter, a game popular with kids when adults aren't looking). Overall, this is a remarkably difficult book to find; I stumbled across it by accident. That's a damn shame, because any serious gambler or strategy gamer should have it.