Pope Joan

Pope Joan is a card game for three to eight players, played with a traditional 52-card deck from which the eight of diamonds has been removed. British in origin, it is an 18th-century member of the Stops family of card games. The Stops family is so named because cards are played in a particular order, determined by the rules of the specific game, and play stops when no one has an appropriate card to play. Other Stops games include Fan Tan, Parliament, Comet, Michigan, and Sevens, and the rules tend to be easy to pick up and lend themselves well to gambling; Stops card games are more often played as family games or among informal groups of friends than in more formal gambling environments like casinos.

Pope Joan was a legendary female pope in the 9th century, first mentioned four centuries later; on the spectrum of myth and history she is closer to King Arthur and Paul Bunyan than Robin Hood and Billy the Kid. There was certainly no female pope, and it is unclear whether any historic figure could have inspired the legend. But when the card game originated, the name was a familiar one, in part because the study of history had lately become more serious, with older written sources less likely to be accepted at face value without some questioning as to whether they could be invention or exaggeration; as such, she had become a common subject of historians and church figures demonstrating her nonexistence, while at the same time fascinating the general public simply because of the idea of a female pope. It is not clear how her name became attached to the card game, except that the game strongly resembles the French game Nain Jaune (“yellow dwarf”), which was new when the Pope Joan game first appears in England. If Jaune were read as Joan, and Nain as Nun, “Pope Joan” could amount to a promotion of the French game, an upgrade.

The game is traditionally played on a round board which revolves, and is used to keep track of bets and play; this is not required to play, and those few players who play the game today may simply use a notebook, since Pope Joan boards are not as easy to find as they used to be. Compartments on the board are labeled Pope (the nine of diamonds), Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Matrimony (king and queen of the trump suit), and Intrique (queen and jack of the trump suit). Chips are placed on each compartment, and are won by whichever player can play the card or cards fitting the compartment's description. Anything unclaimed stays on the board to be claimed in the next hand (or the one after that, et cetera), making Matrimony and Intrigue likely to accumulate a great number of chips. The use of a “dead hand”—a hand dealt to no player, and left unplayed—increases the chances of compartments going unclaimed, especially in games with fewer players (increasing the size of the dead hand and its odds of having any particular card).

...