Today, when people think of card games, what immediately springs to mind? Grandma playing Solitaire on a Sunday night...tuxedoed gentlemen and elegantly attired ladies indulging in Baccarat at Monte-Carlo... giggling children playing a boisterous round of I Doubt It or Slapjack... a Poker game on a Friday night in a smoke-filled room...two thousand or more people seated at hundreds of card tables, concentrating at a Duplicate Bridge tournament...a couple whiling away the time playing Gin Rummy on a crowded airline flight...

All these scenarios share one thing in common: since the late 1300s, people have been using an ordinary pack of playing cards to provide hours of stimulating enjoyment. Over the years, card playing has brought pleasure to millions of people, but it wasn’t until 1887, that the United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, issued the first edition of The Official Rules of Card Games. Since then, this material has been a primary source for rules and the arbiter of disagreements for hundreds of card games.

In this updated version, you will find rules for all the classic favorites as well as some newcomers, including Spades, Bid Whist, Pai-Gow Poker, Robert Abbott's Eleusis, and the Editor's Bridgette and Joker Solitaire.

For the more prominent games, we are also featuring a chart which will enable you to see important details almost at a glance.

And now it is time to break out a fresh deck of Bicycle® cards and enjoy this site.