card game
A card game is played with a deck of cards intended for that game that are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. The backs of the cards in a deck are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards in a deck may all be unique, or may include duplicates, depending on the game. In either case, any card is readily identifiable by its face. The set of cards that make up the deck are known to all of the players using that deck.
Although many games have special decks of cards, the standard deck contains 52 cards in four suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades) and thirteen ranks running from two (deuce) to ten, jack, queen, king, and ace. In addition to games that use the standard deck, there are also games that use some modification of the standard deck, for example removing all cards of rank lower than some rank (as in a pinochle deck), adding a special card (joker) to the standard deck, or rearranging the ranks of the cards. Many European regions have their own variants of the standard deck having different names and imagery for suits, or having a different set of ranks in the cards.