Rook Et Cetera Page
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![[Picture of Rook Deck]](pics/rookdeck.gif)
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dutton@alumni.princeton.edu
February 22, 2001
Rook - Et Cetera!
Using a Rook Deck
The rules I gave assume that you are using a standard card deck. However, Parker Brothers (now owned by Hasbro) has been making an official Rook deck for years now. Unfortunately, this original Rook deck does not seem to be available to buy on-line anymore. Fortunately, another company, Winning Moves, makes a "Deluxe Rook" set, which can be safely and easily purchased through amazon.com:
Click here to find and order a Deluxe Rook set!
(Winning Moves has also put out other popular Parker Brothers card games such as Pit, Flinch, Mille Bornes, and a "Collector's Edition" of Mille Bornes. Collect them all!)
If you're a collector, you can often find old Rook decks for sale on auction sites such as amazon auctions or eBay. Just search for "rook". These sites can also give you a general idea how much your old deck is worth (the idea being that it's only worth as much as people are willing to pay).
So there you go. The cards in a Rook deck are numbered from 1 to 14, with colors (red, green, yellow, and black) instead of suits, and a Rook card (with a picture of a crow - or rook) instead of a joker.
Yeah, there are *14* cards in a suit (and thus *15* trump cards). Adapting my rules, the 1 (the highest card in a suit) would be worth 15 points, the 14 (the second-highest card in a suit) would be worth 10 points, and all the other point values remain the same.
Rook Software
You can now play Rook on your PC or over the internet! Hasbro has put out Parker Brothers Card Games for Windows (Mac and Unix users like myself are out of luck), which lets you play Rook and other Parker Brothers favorites by yourself or with strangers. You can also purchase the software through zShops at amazon.com:
Click here to find and order
Parker Brothers Card Games
(including Rook) for your PC!
games.com used to have Rook on their site, but they don't anymore. I'm not aware of any other place to play Rook on the internet. If you find a place, please let me know!
You're welcome to tell me if you find any other Rook software out there, but please don't ask me if there is any other software out there - as soon as I find other software or am told about other software, I'll put links to them here!
Rook Tournaments
A few tournaments have been brought to my attention:
- An Optimist Club somewhere in Kentucky is having a tournament on
January 16, 1999. Email cwogmon@aol.com
for more details.
- There will be a tournament at The Hancock County Rescue Squad in
Sneedville, Tennessee on March 12, 1998. It is open to the public, and
costs $10 per team. They sponsor tournaments about six times a year and
play about 3 or 4 times a week at the Squad Building. New players are
always welcome. Contact them at
porsche65@yahoo.com.
- Jack Gregory, Vice-President of Cumberland University, is having
a tournament there spring of 1999. Presumably it is open to the public.
Contact him at
jlgregory@cumberland.edu.
- Chad Strohschein says he has fund-raising tournaments for his camp
in Alberta, and says that Rook there is often called "Baptist Poker".
He seems to play the same way we do, except that no points can be dumped in
the kitty. Email him at chad@glink2.com
if you're in the area and if you want to join the tournament!
Et cetera, et cetera
I can't exactly tell you why the game or the joker is called Rook. John McLeod has sent me a partial answer and some background information about the game. He also maintains a very comprehensive list of card games from around the world. Learn to play them all! (For another good list of card games, try about.com's card game site.)According to Debra Abale, the game was created by George S. Parker (of Parker Brothers) and his wife Grace, and the rules of the game were copyrighted in 1931, not 1934, as John said. But Kirsten Allen says she has a deck of Rook cards from 1926 with a copyright date of 1913.
Michael Urban sent me a cool gif file of a flyer advertising Rook, which he says dates from the 1910's. He also sent the flip side of the flyer, which is an advertisement for Pit, another Parker Brothers card game.
Asif Azhar, a collector of vintage card and board games writes: "Rook was one of Geo S. Parker's favorite games, but Parker Bros. did not want to produce it in its regular line. So Geo created another company, Rook Card Co., to produce it. It was first made by this company in 1906, then patented on March 22, 1910."
And Jack Jenkins sent me a gif of a page out of an old Rook rulebook. He writes: "There are 14 different games of rook in there, including the REGULAR ROOK, all with individual copyrights from 1909 to 1924. The regular rook is 1916. I have a question on when the so-called 'rook card' or joker came into the rules. This rule book is very plain in stating that there are only 56 cards in the deck: 1 through 14, 4 colors, and count cards of 5, 10, and 14. There is no mention of the rook card or joker as it may be called in any of the games. Our modern rule book of a copyright 1952 through 1964 mentions this card and a deck of 57 in all of the various individual games." Can anyone help with the question?
Anyway, I can tell you that I've enjoyed playing Rook since college, and I hope you'll like it, too. I welcome any comments!
