Pagat.com
Pagat.com is a website containing rules to hundreds of card games from all over the world. Maintained by John McLeod, it contains information for traditional, commercial, and newly invented card games from all over the world.
The site does not provide official rules to "folk games", but rather reports how the games are actually played. As a consequence, the game articles provide many variants for the described games. The site relies on volunteer contributors from all over the world, and the game articles provide information on where the games are played as described and who has contributed the rules. The site also describes games that are played with domino-style tiles, which, although similar in spirit, are not strictly speaking card games. In addition, the site contains many pages related to card games in general, including a page on the general mechanics of card games.
The word "Pagat" in the website's name is derived from the term given to the lowest ranking trump in Tarock card games such as Königrufen.
David Parlett's book Teach Yourself Card Games recommends the site as the first and probably the only place one needs to seek for rules of card games, and his A-Z of Card Games refers to entries in pagat.com for the rules of those games that are only mentioned in the book.
References
- Parlett, David, Teach Yourself Card Games, McGraw-Hill, 2003
- Parlett, David, A-Z of Card Games, Oxford University Press, 2004