Playing Card County Maps
Wyvern
🖼 236 images Cartographer
By chance, I came upon an item in the press this week about a playing-card map of the county of Northumberland in England from about 1676, by Robert Morden (well-known British mapmaker of the period), which had been sold at auction. This is an image of the card's face:
This kind of black-and-white period style is one already readily available in CC3+. However, the concept of playing-card county maps like this (apparently, the complete deck included all the counties of England and Wales, and was updated several times over the following century) was new to me, and something that seemed an interesting concept to introduce to fantasy RPG mapping, perhaps.
A suitable template could be created quite easily in CC3+ for a full card deck, and a background fill texture applied before adding the maps and details. The nature of the maps means they wouldn't all need to fit together ultimately, although it would be practical to devise a large, full-country map first, and then cut it into segments to fit to the cards.
The auctioneers' webpage where I found the original image is here, as it also shows the card's plain(-ish!) back. The local press for Northeast England has further details, as the information on this webpage is pretty sparse. I'm never sure if those outside the UK will be able to access the press sites though, so haven't given any links here.
Comments
I am curious how 17th century folks would use these cards. Were they used like playing cards, or some other card game? Were they intended to be used like puzzles? Memory/trivia cards, where you'd ask someone a question based on something on a card? Modular maps? It's very intriguing.
It does have a suit symbol, clubs, and a number, VI, so I'd guess it was usable as playing cards. Whether it was actually used that way or not.
There's a number of places that print custom playing card decks at realistic prices, too.
That is a pretty cool thing.
I like the idea.
You can play card games with these real world map cards, but at the price they are nowadays no one would dare risk damaging them by using them for the intended purpose - if there is anywhere a full set of the things.
Reasonably high quality images of the full set are available, so it seems likely that full sets are as well. But yeah, they'd be way too expensive to actually use, especially since they won't be modern card stock that is resistant to wear and tear.
I wonder if they would sell, if any of us made a new set of the counties of England and Wales using one of these custom playing card printing sites mentioned by Taustinoc.
To answer some of the questions here, yes these were genuinely used as playing cards back in the day, but they also had an educational aspect, described sometimes as a sort-of early pocket atlas. The full sets included the usual 52 cards, an explanatory extra card, and a title card with a map of England and Wales divided into counties. The cards were among the first maps to show roads. As the sample here shows, they also gave the county dimensions, latitude (they predate the adoption of the Greenwich meridian for longitude in the mid-19th century in Britain) and selected towns' distances from London. It's thought only one complete set of these cards still survives, although there are a few incomplete ones, and more surviving individual cards.