Let's Play Cards ---------------- Playing cards were invented in Imperial China. They were found in China as early as the 9th century during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The first reference to card games dates from the 9th century, when the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by Tang Dynasty writer Su E, described Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing the "leaf game" in 868 with members of the Wei clan, the family of the princess' husband. The Song Dynasty (960–1279) scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) asserted that playing cards and card games existed at least since the mid-Tang Dynasty and associated their invention with the simultaneous development of using sheets or pages instead of paper rolls as a writing medium. The first known book on cards called Yezi Gexi was allegedly written by a Tang era woman, and was commented on by Chinese writers of subsequent dynasties. By the 11th century, playing cards were spread throughout the Asian continent and later came into Mamluk Egypt. The Mamluk pack contained 52 cards comprising four suits: polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups. A near complete pack of Mamluk playing cards was discovered by Leo Mayer in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, in 1939. This particular pack was not made before 1400, but the pack was matched to a privately owned fragment dated to the 12th or 13th century. It is not a complete pack, but there are cards of three packs of the same style. Contemporary playing cards are grouped into three broad categories based on the suits they use: French, Latin, and German. Latin suits are used in the closely related Spanish and Italian formats. The Swiss German suits are distinct enough to merit their subcategory. Excluding Jokers and Tarot trumps, the French 52-card deck preserves the number of cards in the original Mamluk deck, while Latin and German decks average fewer. Latin decks usually drop the higher-valued pip cards, while German decks drop the lower-valued ones. The Unicode standard for text encoding on computers defines 8 characters for card suits in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, at U+2660–2667. Unicode 7.0 added a unified pack for Tarot's trump cards (Major Arcana) and the 52 cards of the modern French pack, with 4 Knights, together with a character for "Playing Card Back" and black, red, and white jokers in the block U+1F0A0–1F0FF. Unicode characters may not be printed correctly in eclipse, but are printed correctly in a terminal. Input ----- None. Output ------ The Unicode of ♣ is 2663