Ganjifa cards: the Mughal trick game, played online for three

The Mughal pack, and which pack this is

The Ashmolean traces the name to the Persian ganj, treasure, and says the cards were brought into India from Persia and popularised in the early Mughal period, the early 16th century. Wikipedia’s history of the game cites Babur’s memoirs for a pack sent in 1527, and says it spread from the Mughal court to the general public, with cheaper sets in wood, palm leaf, stiffened cloth or pasteboard. In India they are typically round, painted by hand and finished in heavy lacquer to survive the handling. Sawantwadi, Mysore and Odisha still have artists who paint sets. A Mughal Ganjifa pack is eight suits of twelve: the king is the Mir, the minister is the Wazir, and the numeral cards run one to ten. The Ashmolean names the suits for what they show: a crown (Taj), a silver coin (Safed), a sword (Shamsher), a servant (Ghulam), a harp (Chang), a gold coin (Surkh), a document (Barat) and merchandise (Qimash), which Wikipedia calls cloth.

Other packs exist. Dashavatara is a later Hindu form of the pack, with ten suits and 120 cards, one suit for each avatar of Vishnu, its king the raja, played mainly in Sawantwadi. Odisha, also spelled Orissa, has ganjapa, with stylised symbols and extra suits. We deal the eight-suited Mughal pack. There is no Dashavatara pack here.

If you came for handmade cards, Amazon or a PDF

If you searched for handmade Ganjifa cards, Ganjifa cards on Amazon or a Ganjifa cards PDF, this is the wrong place. Nothing here is for sale, and there is no PDF to print. Search results are mostly about the art and the objects: handmade sets, painted and lacquered, from Mysore and Sawantwadi, museum shelves, Amazon listings and craft shops. To see the real thing, the Ashmolean’s collection includes a 19th-century Mughal set from Rajasthan, each card 3.8 centimetres across, and a Sawantwadi Dashavatara set of about 1900 with cards ten centimetres across. The cards on this table are new digital art in the Mughal pattern, not a scan of a painted set.

So we show the cards at work instead. Each of the 96 faces is its own round image with its name printed on it, and each was drawn separately, so the borders and the little emblems differ from card to card. The printed name is too small to read once a hand is fanned, so every card also carries an index chip: M, W or the number, and a letter for its suit. Suits go by emblem, never by colour. Surkh means red, and the Surkh cards on this table are green.

Which rules, and where the books disagree

Several games are played with Ganjifa cards, and this is the individual trick game, everyone for themselves. Real Ganjifa has no single rulebook. Our deal and opening come from an 1815 description of the Mughal pack in the Calcutta Magazine, which Chatto reprinted in 1848. The ladder of what you must lead comes from Michael Dummett’s rules, the fullest we found, as the Basque games site Jokoenea sets them out, and there they are written for the ten-suit Dashavatara pack. The Ashmolean and the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts both say the two games share their rules, near enough, so we carry the ladder across to the Mughal pack. That is a judgement, and it is ours.

John McLeod’s 1997 account, the one Wikipedia’s game section follows, differs on two points. After a deni, the call described below, his caller keeps the lead; here the seat holding the top card takes the trick and leads, as in Dummett. His second phase starts with the last twelve cards; ours starts once all three of you have held the lead and lost it, which Dummett and Sally Wilkins both give.

Elsewhere we play it simpler, and the how-to page lists where. The table plays a top card for you, so nobody forgets one. Nothing is staked: a deal is worth the cards you won above 32, your third of the pack. Dummett’s optional calls, the double deni and the rest, are left out, and so are four and six seats, partnerships and the gambling game Naqsh.

A deal, and the hukm, worked through

Three seats, 96 cards, dealt in batches of four, 32 each. The first and last batch you are dealt go face up, so eight cards of every hand are open until played. A hand with no Mir voids the deal, and the arithmetic says that happens to one deal in ten. By day the Mir of Surkh opens, by night the Mir of Safed, and the table alternates, day first. The holder plays that king with any other card, each other seat puts down two cards of its choice, and the opener takes all six and leads.

The heart of the game is the hukm, the highest card still unplayed in a suit. There are no trumps and suits are never compared, so only a suit’s hukm can win a trick in it. The order depends on the suit. In Taj, Safed, Shamsher and Ghulam it runs Mir, Wazir, then ten down to one. In Chang, Surkh, Barat and Qimash it runs Mir, Wazir, then one up to ten. So the ten of Taj is the third-best Taj and the ten of Chang is the worst Chang. Once the Mir and Wazir of Taj are played, the ten of Taj is the hukm, and whoever holds it wins the next Taj led or called.

What you must lead, from the top down

The table offers only the leads the rules allow, in a fixed order. A run from the top comes first. Hold the Mir and the Wazir of Taj but not the ten, say, and you must lead the Mir and keep the Wazir: each other seat plays any one card, you take all three, and your Wazir is now the hukm. Next is a deni. You hold a suit’s Wazir, another seat holds its Mir, and you hold a low card of that suit, so you give that low card and the Mir has to answer. It takes the trick and leads, which leaves your Wazir on top. After that you choose: a talafa is a call in a suit where you hold the second-best card, and an utari cashes your hukm cards. With no hukm to cash you can give up the lead instead: your hand is shuffled face down, the next seat picks one of the backs, and that card is led blind.

Once all three of you have held the lead and lost it, the second phase begins and the rules loosen: hukm cards can be cashed one at a time, and a call can go down face down while you name the suit you are after.

What the table does, and what it does not

On the computer table you sit with computer 1 and computer 2, they answer after a beat, and you press Next deal when a deal ends. A button picks a match of 3 deals or 6. With friends, the host opens a room for exactly three people, the host, guest 1 and guest 2, and chooses 3 deals or 6. A room has no computer seats, so the third seat has to be a person, and if one of the three walks away mid-deal the table waits, because nothing plays for an absent seat. It is free, with no account and no download, and an ad may turn up every now and then; we will try to keep it discreet.

The board carries what a 96-card game will not let you keep in your head. A tracker lists every suit’s twelve cards in strength order, strikes the ones played and names each suit’s top card. Each suit says whether it is ten high or one high, and your hand is sorted by suit, then by strength, with the word hukm on your top cards. You see your own hand and the eight open cards of each other seat; won piles show only a count. One catch: the tracker knows only cards played face up, so in the second phase a top card it names can already be gone. No hints.

The computer sees what you see: its own hand, the open cards and everything played face up. It counts every card played face up, which is the hard part of this game, and plays by a handful of plain rules. It throws away the cards least likely to win first, leads its longest run first, will not give away a lone Wazir, and when it is the seat that picks your blind lead, it picks at random. We think the best game to play with friends is the one where you all know the rules or none of you does, and nobody turns up knowing this one.