It’s no fun playing bridge with cheap bad quality cards. Try the selection for Bridge Cards Australia.
Bridge Playing cards come in a wide range of prices and levels of quality. And like most products, you tend to get what you pay for. And there are literally thousands of choices to be found in the bridge cards market.
The most common and popular cards are the traditional red and blue backed cards available in single decks. Usually made from cardboard, these offer an affordable playing card option while not offering a high level of quality. These playing cards are ideal for children or the casual gamer but serious bridge players will not be satisfied with their quality, as their life span is usually quite short.
Plastic playing cards will usually last longer and again, there is a range of quality, depending on the plastic used in manufacture. The Kem Playing Card company from the United States makes the best plastic playing cards in the world – indeed these are rightly considered the Rolls Royce of bridge playing cards and come with a lifetime guarantee – not many brands can afford to make this offer.
Bridge players tend to prefer decorative cards – this means a nice picture or pattern printed on the back of the card. There are many famous playing card manufacturers in the world making fine bridge decorative cards – Kem, Piatnik, Congress, Fournier to name a few.
The Piatnik company from Austria are easily the most popular decorative bridge cards in the world. The offer a huge selection of cards with all sorts of prints – for example pictures from impressionist artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Lautrec and all are beautiful cards. Piatnik’s signature playing cards though, are their Royal range – where the court cards depicts famous kings and queens from the major royal families across Europe.
Some of the Kem company’s playing card patterns have become icon symbols of the company – namely the classic Maple Leaf pattern and the red and blue Arrow pattern. The Arrow pattern gained world-wide attention in 1967 when the Kem Playing Company sent a double deck of these cards to every US soldier fighting in Vietnam.
Playing card faces have traditionally been in two colours – red for hearts and diamonds and black for spades and clubs but a recent trend has been the introduction of so-called four-colour decks, primarily as a visual aide. Nowadays, the thirteen hearts are still red and the spade cards are still black but the diamonds cards are now printed in orange and the club cards are now printed in a shade of grey. This has been applauded a positive development in playing card design.