To my horror, one of my favourite card games - Solo Whist - was devised in France. As it seems were many of the best. I have read no further but ought. The significance of the picture cards etc seems more than quite political. Any Res Hist thoughts on this?

After aghast dismay at the first sight of his new Bride Ann of Cleaves, they spent their wedding night playing cards, so goes the tale …….Just saying.

I gather whist is a form of bridge, and is much mentioned in Georgette Heyer's Regency books. It seems less popular now, as are most forms of card games, excepting perhaps bridge. In my childhood we played a lot of euchre - every small centre had a weekly euchre night in the winter. Ours, luckily for children, was on a Saturday, so we went faithfully every week. 
mostly they have died out, though I see euchre afternoons advertised in my local resthome.

The other game we played, and was much played in WWII, was 500, a more sophisticated form of euchre. Our families played this together, my grandmother and uncle always against my father and his sister-in-law. There was much argument about the use of the joker, I recall. My father and aunt would immediately call 6 no trumps if they had the joker. 

Then there was crib (or cribbage). We just played it in our own home. 

There must be other card games that are played in other countries or other centuries. I might have thought it would be against religious observations but none of our family or others seemed to mind, despite being strong Presbyterians. Our one had a raffle every week, and we took tickets, though I do recall one family in another small settlement who didn't run one because one of their regulars objected and said they wouldn't come any more if they held one.

Caro, I think we have or had the sophisticated euchre in East-Flanders (province of East-Flanders Ghent). We called it "bieden" (bid). In West-Flanders (province of West-Flanders Bruges) we have mostly "manillen".
"Our one had a raffle every week, and we took tickets, though I do recall one family in another small settlement who didn't run one because one of their regulars objected and said they wouldn't come any more if they held one."
What do you mean with "raffle", I hope it is not the meaning of the French "rafle" for instance on the Jews in Vichy France in 1942
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafle_du_26_ao%C3%BBt_1942
The link don't exist in English, but I found for the French "rafle": "round up"?
Regards, Paul.

FARO

"All these luxuries becoming my station could not, of course, be purchased without credit and money, to procure which, as our patrimony had been wasted by our ancestors, and we were above the vulgarity and slow returns and doubtful chances of trade, my uncle kept a Faro bank"
The Luck of Barry Lyndon----William Makepiece Thackeray.

Beginning in late 17th century France, Pharaoh, Pharo, and subsequently Faro was an extremely popular card game in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Play is as follows:

Wiki:

[*]A deck of cards was shuffled and placed inside a "dealing box", a mechanical device also known as a "shoe", which was used to prevent manipulations of the draw by the banker and intended to assure players of a fair game.
[*]The first card in the dealing box was called the "soda" and was "burned off", leaving 51 cards in play. The dealer then drew two cards: the first was called the "banker's card" and was placed on the right side of the dealing box. The next card after the banker's card was called the carte anglaise (English card) or simply the "player's card", and it was placed on the left of the shoe.
[*]The banker's card was the bettor's "losing card"; regardless of its suit, all bets placed on the layout's card that had the same denomination as the banker's card were lost by the players and won by the bank. The player's card was the "winning card". All bets placed on the card that had that denomination were returned to the players with a 1 to 1 (even money) payout by the bank (e.g., a dollar bet won a dollar). A "high card" bet won if the player’s card had a higher value than the banker’s card.
[*]The dealer settled all bets after each two cards drawn. This allowed players to bet before drawing the next two cards. Bets that neither won nor lost remained on the table, and could be picked up or changed by the player prior to the next draw.
[*]When only three cards remained in the dealing box, the dealer would "call the turn", which was a special type of bet that occurred at the end of each round. The object now was to predict the exact order that the three remaining cards, Bankers, Players, and the final card called the Hock, would be drawn. The player's odds here were 5 to 1, while a successful bet paid off at 4 to 1 (or 1 to 1 if there were a pair among the three, known as a "cat-hop"). This provided one of the dealer's few advantages in faro. If it happened that the three remaining cards were all the same, there would be no final bet, as the outcome was not in question.


As depicted in Stanley Kubricks' production of Thackeray's novel. The device in the background which looks like an abacus is called a "cardkeep". Unlike other card games where card counting is frowned on, in Faro a card count is kept for the information of both players and banker.



In addition to the fictional Barry, Faro was patronised by such diverse characters as Casanova and Wyatt Earp. The American West being a particularly popular place for Faro.

I think it's the other way round, Caro - bridge being a development of whist (or "whisk" I think was the original  name) - when Hornblower was on the beach with no pay (a promotion not having been confirmed, leaving him to pay back the extra pay he'd had) he played whist to sustain himself. My grandmother used to attend whist drives at a couple of local villages, regularly winning prizes for "gent or lady playing gent". Cribbage, along with bar skittles, dominos, darts and bar billiards, used to form part of a regular "pintathlon" contest (with "handicaps" which increased your scores according to how much beer you had partaken of.)
Mis-spent youth? We didn't see it like that. Mind you, by the end of the night we didn't really see much at all.

Edit - You can relax, Priscilla: "Solo whist, a nonpartnership game still popular in Britain, derives from whist de Gand (Ghent whist), a Belgian simplification of Boston whist." see https://www.britannica.com/topic/whist