Historical playing cards are witnesses of the past, icons of the social and economic reality of their time. On display in museums or stored in archives, ancient playing cards are no longer what they once were meant to be: a deck of cards made for playful entertainment. This project aims at making historical playing cards playable again by means of the well-known solitaire card game “Freecell”.

Historical Tarot Freecell 1.1

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

The cards need to be held upright and use Roman numeral indexing. The lack of modern features like point symmetry and Arabic numerals made the deck increasingly unpopular.

Due to the lack of corner indices - features offered by 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
2015/02/28 v1.1: Help option offering modern suit and value indices in the upper left corner
2015/03/21 v1.1: Retina display and responsive design

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

• Prof. Thomas Weibel, Thomas Weibel Multi & Media