Parlor, Card & Other Games:

Comic illustration from Maj. John Scott's Partisan Life With Mosby (1867)

Articles on this Website: How to play Whist Key Off-Site Links: Mike Mescher's book on parlor games at www.RaggedSoldier.com (click on parlor games link for game supplies, including "Conversation Cards" and game cards for "Question and Answer" and "Little Fortune Teller" TradGames.org -- British traditional games website has history of a variety of different games

Articles / Resources On Other Sites, By Topic:

Parlour Game Links:

(NOTE: other than Mike Mescher's site & the Regency games site, many of these sites cover parlor games that became popular AFTER our era as well as ones already in current use by the Civil War, so check documentation carefully).

• Mike Mescher's book on parlor games at www.RaggedSoldier.com (click on parlor games link for game supplies)
• Parlour Games at The Victorian Emporium.net
• Parlour Games at Seedsofknowledge.com
• Another Victorian Parlor Games Website
• Parlour Games at VictoriasPast.com
• Regency Era Parlour Games at "Playing Games at Jane Austen's". Covers indoor sports like shuttlecock as well as typical parlour games.
• Another site on Geocities

Card Game Links

• Gaming in the Early 19th century - from Gore Place Website
• Popular 19th c. card games: From the "Playing Games at Jane Austen's" website: mostly focused on the Regency era, but most of those games were still around by our time and many are still around today.
• History of Playing Cards (from "Playing Games at Jane Austen's")
• English Playing Card Society
• 52plusjoker.org -- web link with several pictures of antique decks of cards
• Barry Magarick's Antique Playing Card Collection
• Pictures of early 19th c. card/gaming tables from American-Antiques.net (before our era but the sort of inherited furniture old established families would have had)
• Rules for Euchre (responsible for the "joker" being added to American card decks in the mid 19th c)
• History of Games Timeline
• Pictures of 18th and 19th century cribbage boards

Board & Other Game Links:

• "The Mansion of Happiness" - picture of ca. 1864 board game manufactured in Massachussetts, on the New York Historical Society "The Games We Played" website.
• ca. 1866 checkers-based board game produced by Milton Bradley, on the New York Historical Society "The Games We Played" website.
• Photograph of ca. 1820 Dominos set and a mid 19th c dominos set
• History of dominos (tradgames.org)
• Antique clay marbles
• ca. 1870s game set with checkers, backgammon, etc.
• History of Backgammon
• History of Checkers
• History of Bagatelle (tradgames.org)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Leisure & Pastimes

• Mike Mescher's Parlour Games book (see description above)
• The Sociable or 1001 Home Amusements, by George Arthur. (1858) Available in reproduction form from RaggedSoldier.com. To quote their website, "This reproduction is "the Bible" for home-grown entertainments. It contains parlor games, tableaux vivants, charades (not at all like the modern game), magic, and much more. 375 pages"
• Parlett, David. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Touchstone, 1993.
• Samual Orchart Beeton, Beeton's Books of Games (Backgammon-Croquet), Beeton|2 volums|1866
• George Frederick Pardon (aka Captain Rawdon Crawley), A Handbook of Draughts, Routledge|2nd ed. 1863|95 pp
• George Frederick Pardon (aka Captain Rawdon Crawley), Backgammon: Its History and Practice, D. Bogue|1844|79 pp + 16 pp ads