The Kingdoms of Europe. A New Round Game Beautifully Illustrated. First Series

London: John Jaques & Son, 1895. Box. Good. A scarce card game, abundantly illustrated, from a leading manufacturer and inventor of games -- the firm of John Jaques goes back to 1795! 45 cards, representing nine countries, with each country having a card which has a color vignette of its flag and the name of cities below. Each of the named cities also receives a card, dominated with a color illustration of the city, below which are captions that set forth a salient fact or facts about the city (usually there are several points made). The deck is complete, based on all the cities mentioned on the flag cards are present, and the card box is obviously at capacity. We lack an instruction sheet or brochure which had to have come with the game. Our best guess is that the game was a variant on the Game of Families -- one of the many iconic games invented by the Jaques company -- although the variant number of cards per country might undermine our supposition. In any event, the interest, at least to us, is not the game per se but the imagery, which is delightful. Curiously, the United Kingdom is broken down into three countries -- England, Ireland and Scotland -- each with 7, 5 and 5 cards, respectively. The other countries are France, 7 cards; Belgium, 4; Holland, 4; Switzerland, 4; Spain, 6; Portugal, 3. The backs of cards are all simply pink, as often encountered in game and tarot cards of the nineteenth century. In terms of scarcity, there is but one institutional copy listed on OCLC First Search -- a Japanese institution. The listing specifies 48 cards. Either this is an error, or the instructions were on cards. There is a website for Jaques card games which has pictured a deck, with two country cards missing. There were no decks we could find in commerce on the date of our cataloguing. The V & A has a fairly extensive collection of Jaques card games; this game is not among its holdings. Our dating is based on the description of the two decks we did find. The dating, though, is best viewed as approximate. We would have dated the deck somewhat earlier but for these descriptions. We do realize that an exact dating is probably attainable since the Jaques company is still in business. The cards are a standard size: 9.5 by 7.5 cm. The box is about 3 cm thick. A few of the cards are heavily soiled, with the majority having some soiling, and some come off as essentially clean. All the cards are fully legible, with no loss or obscuring of the text or imagery. The original box has a good amount of wear, with torn edges, soiling, and the like, all rather typical for a card box. The pasted on label with the game name and publisher is fully intact.