Card games in Portugal

French suited cards (hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades) are in general use. The special type of Latin cards with dragons on the aces, known to collectors as Portuguese pattern cards, have long been obsolete. However, the memory of these cards lingers in that some games (such as Sueca) rank the court cards in the order king-jack-queen instead of king-queen-jack, presumably because the jack and queen were thought to correspond to the knight and maid respectively in the Latin suited cards.

Popular Portuguese games include:

• Sueca - a point-trick game of the ace-ten group for four players using a 40-card deck, and its variant with bidding: Sueca italiana.
• Bisca - a related game usually played by two or six players.
• King - a compendium game for four players, in which most of the contracts involve avoiding taking certain cards in tricks.
• Bismarck, a variant of the Swedish game with a few features borrowed from King.
• Americana - a four player plain-trick game with bidding in which the 2 is the highest card if led but lowest if played to a trick.
• Burro - a kind of trick-taking game in which a player unable to follow suit has to pick up cards and the aim is to run out of cards.

An as yet unsolved mystery is the purpose of a type of 40-card pack produced by the company Litografia Maia, R. Dr. Alfredo de Magalhães, Porto. This pack has no sevens, nines or tens, the cards of each suit being R, D, V, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, A. Presumably this was made for some specific game but we have yet to find any game for which this unusual set of cards, lacking sevens, is normally used.