The Swiss Tarot deck is a 78-card deck used for the
tarot card games
Tarot games are card games played with tarot decks, that is, decks with numbered permanent trumps parallel to the suit cards. The games and decks which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot are called Tarocchi in the original Italian, ...
Troccas
Troccas is a member of the Tarot family of card games.
It is a four player game played in the Romansh speaking part of the canton Grisons of Switzerland.
It is not known exactly how this game entered Switzerland but it is generally thought to ...
and
Troggu
Troggu is a member of the tarot family of card games. Synonyms for the game's name are: Trogga, Tappu and Tappä. It is played in the area of Visp, Switzerland, in Upper Wallis, especially in St. Niklaus and Grächen. After Troccas, it is the ...
. It is also sometimes called the JJ Tarot due to the replacement of the usual second and fifth trumps with cards depicting
Juno
Juno commonly refers to:
*Juno (mythology), the Roman goddess of marriage and queen of the gods
*Juno (film), ''Juno'' (film), 2007
Juno may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Fictional characters
*Juno, in the film ''Jenny, Juno''
*Ju ...
and
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...
, or as 1JJ Tarot in reference to the catalog number of a common release of the deck by A.G. Müller.
History
The deck is derived from the
Tarot de Besançon
The Tarot de Besançon, at the IPCS website. Retrieved 9 Jun 2019. also called the Besançon Tarot or Swiss Tarot, describes a typ ...
, which itself comes from the
Tarot of Marseilles
The Tarot of Marseilles is a standard pattern of Italian-suited tarot pack with 78 cards that was very popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for playing tarot card games and is still produced today. It was probably created in Milan befo ...
. It is an Italian suited pack which substitutes the figures of Juno and Jupiter in place of the Popess and Pope of the Tarot of Marseilles. The first version was produced between 1831 and 1838 in the card factory of Johann Georg Rauch. It was the first
tarot pack
The tarot (, first known as '' trionfi'' and later as ''tarocchi'' or ''tarocks'') is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, ...
made by the factory and was unexpectedly successful in the American market. The first version was manufactured, unaltered, by his successor, Johannes Müller in
Diessenhofen
Diessenhofen is a village and a municipality in Frauenfeld District in the canton of Thurgau in Switzerland. The village is situated on the south shore of the High Rhine just opposite the German town of Gailingen am Hochrhein.
History
Diessenhofe ...
until 1860.Ruh, Max (2005) ''Schaffhauser Spielkarten. Schweizer Pioniere der Wirtschaft und Technik.'' Verein für wirtschaftshistorische Studien, Zurich 2005, , pp 27–31, 52 and 73.
In 1965 the Swiss card game firm, A.G. Müller, issued a reprint which is distinguished by its cleaner lines. The alternative name for the pack comes from this edition, the "1" simply being a number within the product line and "JJ" the replacement of 2 trumps by Juno and Jupiter (see below).
Cards
The
face card
In a deck of playing cards, the term face card (US) or court card (British and US), and sometimes Royalty, is generally used to describe a card that depicts a person as opposed to the pip cards. They are also known as picture cards, or until the e ...
trump
Trump most commonly refers to:
* Donald Trump (born 1946), 45th president of the United States (2017–2021)
* Trump (card games), any playing card given an ad-hoc high rank
Trump may also refer to:
Businesses and organizations
* Donald J. T ...
s and pip cards use additive Roman numeral indexing. The lack of modern features like vertically symmetrical face cards, corner indices, and Arabic numerals has made this deck unpopular for tarot players outside of their native communities. For example, the French-speaking Swiss (Romands) prefer using the
Tarot Nouveau
The Bourgeois Tarot deck is a mid-19th century pattern of tarot cards of German origin that is still used for playing card games today in western Europe and Canada. It is not designed for divinatory purposes.French tarot. It is still the official deck for Troccas tournaments.
Troccas players use the French-language version but refer to their cards with their Romansh (Rhæto-Romanic) nicknames.McLeod, John Troccas at
pagat.com Pagat.com is a website containing rules to hundreds of card games from all over the world. Maintained by John McLeod, it contains information for traditional, commercial, and newly invented card games from all over the world. It has been described ...
. Retrieved 13 February 2018. Troggu players use the German version. The names of the trump cards are as follows: