Swiss playing cards

Parts of Swiss German speaking Switzerland have their own deck of playing cards. They are mostly used for Jass, the "national card game" of Switzerland. The deck is related to the various German playing cards. Within Switzerland, these decks are called German or Swiss German cards.

Distribution of the Swiss deck is roughly east of the Brünig-Napf-Reuss line, in Schaffhausen, St. Gallen (and in adjacent Liechtenstein), Appenzell, Thurgau, Glarus, Zürich, all of Central Switzerland and the eastern part of Aargau.

The suits are as follows:

The most common deck has 36 cards, nine of each suit. The card values are, in ascending order,

For the purposes of Jass, the numbered cards (six to nine) have no point value, the banner has a value of ten points, the picture-cards Under, Ober, König have values of two, three and four points, respectively, and the As has eleven points. The reduction to 36 cards (eliminating card values two to five) and the use of a male Ober instead of the "Queen" (perhaps related to the "Knight") is not unique to the Swiss deck but also found in a variety of German decks. Both "acorn" and "bells" are suits also found in German decks, while "shields" and "roses" seem to be unique to Switzerland.

A less common deck is the 48 card set containing the 3s, 4s, and 5s and is used to play the Karnöffel variant .

The Under corresponds to the Jack or Knave. The Under of trumps becoming the highest card in the game can be traced to the 15th-century game Karnöffel. The face cards in the 1920s Müller design show twelve individual characters, which have remained unchanged since. The sequence Under, Ober, König depicts social stratification, the Under characters are working class, depicted as a fool or jester (Schellen), a messenger or scribe (Schilten), a peasant (Rosen) and a soldier or page/servant, while the Ober characters are shown as clerks or overseers/officers, while the kings are, of course, crowned monarchs (three of them seated, the king of Rosen is shown standing). The four Under characters hold their suit symbol facing downward, the Ober and König characters hold it facing upward (with the exception of Eicheln Ober and Schilten König, whose suit symbols are hovering in the top left corner without their holding it as they are holding a pipe and a cup instead, respectively).

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Wikipedia