Playing cards are lighter, thinner, and sturdier than any American occult Tarot decks. (Well perhaps a few are as sturdy. None are as light or thin.) These ones in particular are also quite well printed. You will find the black is not super dark but the colours are great, compared with many other French brands.For those curious about the French trumps: these cards contain illustrations of scenes from around 1900, almost always with multiple people. There is a different picture for each direction "up", but there's nothing in common between them which would suggest a "right way up". Some of them are men vs. women or boys vs. girls, but others are town vs. country or have some more obscure parallel. It's possible there is a little bit of deliberate correspondence between them and the more symbolic Tarot trumps, but where I can see any, it's just based on one word or so and doesn't go deeper. Still, the scenes have a few interesting symbolic aspects and if you wanted to base a reading on them you could. For gameplay what's important is that the most valuable cards have a Jester depicted somewhere in the scene; in the 1 he's hiding behind a curtain and in the 21 he's dancing in the background.I'm not a fan of the game of Tarot itself but naturally these cards are much better than occult Tarot decks for games, since you can recognize suit quickly from seeing any corner. In fact they're better than poker cards in that respect; every corner of the card has the suit marked. But anyway I'd fully recommend these for games which use Tarot cards. Here's a Solitaire game I made up:Shuffle the Tarot cards thoroughly. Keep them all upright if you're using a fortunetelling deck. Then take the deck in hand face up. (The point of the game is that you don’t need a table surface, and can put the cards away when interrupted; maybe I should call it Pocket Tarot Solitaire or Pocket Tarot Patience.)You are always allowed to move a group of cards from the front of the deck to the back, or from the back to the front. A ‘group’ is a contiguous collection of the same suit. For the sake of clarity, it is not allowed to move part of the group; eg, you can move a single card from the front to the back only if that card is not adjacent to other cards of the same suit.Since you can always move groups of cards, the cards should really be thought of as being in a big circle in your hand; the rest of the rules will picture them that way. So at any time it’s desired, you can perform a cut in order to cycle around to some convenient point. (Some people find it unintuitive that repeated cuts preserve the overall order. They do. Convince yourself repeated cuts don’t shuffle.)The basic operation of the game is to spend “energy” in order to perform a swap of two groups. The goal will be to rearrange the cards into a mere 5 groups, so, all the suits together (the major arcana are a suit). Energy is disorder; specifically, disorder *within* a group.So the basic operation will look like this:…(some group of cards)(some group of cards)(group A, in which we will spend energy by increasing order)(group B, which we will swap with C)(group C, which we will swap with B)(some group of cards)…This can be done in either direction: if there’s still energy in C, we can spend it in order to swap A and B. Another way to think about this is that we spend energy in one group of cards in order to ‘push’ an adjacent group away.With one exception, you must spend the energy in A before performing the swap. The exception occurs if A and C are both groups of Major Arcana cards; the majors are considered to have greater foresight or sensitivity, and can use energy before it’s spent. (But it must be spent directly after the swap.) This only helps when A has no energy but A and C combined have energy.Spending energy means swapping two adjacent cards of the same suit, where the high card is in front of the low card; so after the swap, the low card will be in front of the high one, and as the game progresses, groups of cards will become better sorted. A group which has become completely sorted has run out of energy, and is more or less dead weight until you manage to shove it next to another group of the same suit.So spending energy looks more or less like this:… (frontward direction) …(some group of cards)King of Swords, which will get swapped with the Two of SwordsTwo of Swords, which will get swapped with the King of SwordsFive of SwordsSix of Swords(group of cards B, which will get swapped with C)(group of cards C, which will get swapped with B)…Of course, after the swap occurs, groups of the same suit may end up next to each other, which means they combine. That’s usually good, and usually provides extra energy.So the high cards such as the King slowly make their way to the back or bottom of groups, and each step along their journey helps move other groups around or even combines cards into groups. Similarly the low cards make their way step by step to the front.There is one more rule, something to help if you’re stuck without enough energy. If the Fool is currently by itself, not next to any other major arcana card, then it is allowed to “wander” in either direction, swapping itself with adjacent groups. Keep in mind that once it bumps into another major arcana card, it loses this ability. But being the lowest card, you can always have it wander to the back of a group of majors, which will add energy to that group since it belongs to the front.Furthermore, any time the fool is upright (it starts the game upright), you can “borrow” energy from it by flipping it upside down. (With the Tarot playing cards, you do this by reversing the card, showing the red cardback.) You then immediately perform a swap as if it were group A and had paid the proper energy price. Even better, if the fool is in a group with other cards of the major arcana, then it can flip one of those cards upside down in the same way. So if your Fool is sitting with 5 other majors, you can borrow 6 energy (at which point they’ll all be upside down.)When a group containing upside-down cards bumps into another group of major arcana, you need to immediately repay these reversals if possible; spend 1 energy within the group to flip 1 card upright. Cards which are reversed cannot give energy except to flip themselves upright. In the unlikely event that you end the game with some cards still reversed, you have not really won since you never repaid the borrowed energy.I think that covers everything. At the beginning you’ll have very few groups of more than one card, often only two or three with any energy to spend. But as long as you can start gathering suits together, you get more and more energy pretty quickly. The problem then is getting that energy where it needs to be in order to accomplish anything. The groups which have energy need to be shoved around by each other, without using up too much of it. My experience has been that even once you gain a strong foothold and have plenty of energy, winning can still be fairly complicated. I’ve found myself ready to declare defeat but then finding an unexpected way to use my remaining energy to get more. This a pretty long solitaire game, often around two hours; but it makes up for that by being portable and easy to set down and pick back up.Once the cards are all in five groups, if you want to judge your energy use you can calculate a score. This simply consists of counting how much energy is left in each group and adding it up. A good score is over 200; my high score is 245.

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Good quality, pretty looking deck of cards. Note though that the deck I've received was blue, not red, so it might vary by order. The indexes (indices?) on the cards are narrow and near the corner enough that you can easily identify cards, even when 18 or more cards are in your hands. The French-only tarot Rule-book inside is a nice touch, too bad I can't speak French.

High quality set for a decent price

Fournier hace unas cartas que con apariencia frágil y cartón no muy grueso, tienen un lacado al agua que resulta práctico (deslizan bien unas sobre otras) y muy duradero.Esta baraja tiene un diseño demasiado clásico y austero. Lo bueno que tiene es que debe ser una referencia para el tarot (diseño "oficial"), hasta el punto que puede convertirse en una baraja de juego general, por la simpleza de sus palos y números y el estandar del reverso. Tamaño pequeño y manejable.No he entendido lo que equivale a los arcanos mayores, son ilustraciones de la vida cotidiana de época. Baraja muy funcional, hace bien su trabajo, pero demasiado austera. Ninguna originalidad ni licencia para personalizar cada carta.