The project aims at making historical playing cards playable again by means of the well-known solitaire card game “Freecell” which has been recoded for the purpose.

Historical Tarot Freecell 1.1

Tarot Freecell is a fully playable solitaire card game coded in HTML 5. It offers a random setup mode, reset and undo options, and an autoplay function when the current game has been won. The game features a historical 78-card deck used for card games and divination. The cards were printed in the 1880s by J. Müller & Cie., Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

The cards are not reversible and use Roman numeral indexing. The lack of modern features like reversibility and Arabic numerals made the deck increasingly unpopular.

Due to the lack of point symmetry and corner indices, important features of modern playing cards, the vertical card offset needs to be significantly higher than in other computer adaptations.

2015/02/27 v1.0: Basic game engine adapted to display historical playing cards
2015/02/28 v1.1: Help option offering modern suit and value indices in the upper left corner
2015/03/05 v1.1: Dark background for more effective card display, improved corner indices

• Wikipedia: Tarot 1JJ
• Wikimedia Commons: Tarot 1JJ card set

• Thomas Weibel, Prof. M. A., Journalist BR