Piquet pack
one of the playing cards 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king and ace
A Piquet pack or, less commonly, a Piquet deck, is a pack of 32 French suited cards that is used for a wide range of card games. The name derives from the game of Piquet which was commonly played in Britain and elsewhere in Europe until the 20th century and is still occasionally played by connoisseurs. In the Netherlands it is referred to as a Jass pack, a term derived from games of the Jass type.
Also referred to as Piquet cards, Piquet packs are still produced as standard packs of cards today, especially in Europe, for example to play the German national game of Skat. A Piquet pack also may be formed from a standard 52-card French pack by simply removing the Deuces, Treys, Fours, Fives and Sixes.
History
The French Piquet pack originally comprised 36 cards, but was reduced to 32 cards around 1700. The 36-card packs continued to be produced in France until at least 1775, but thereafter became extinct. It is known that, in England, the game of Maw was played with a 36-card pack up to the end of the 17th century.
Games played with the Piquet pack
Well-known games played with a Piquet pack include the following:
Belote, France's national card game, very similar to the Dutch Klaberjass.
Bête, a gambling game and descendant of Ombre
Bezique, "one of the most illustrious games of European high society" for which 2 packs are needed.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Piquet pack” is one of the playing cards 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king and ace. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Piquet, pack and playing, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “one of the playing cards 7, 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, king and ace” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2688165. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1700 and 1775.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piquet pack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.