Quadrille (card game)

Spanish playing cards may originally have been used in Ombre
This article is about the four-hand game. For the one-player game, see Quadrille (patience).

Quadrille is a card game that was highly popular in the 18th century at the French court and among the British nobility, especially women. A variant of the three-player, Spanish card game Ombre, it is played by four players, both in varying alliances and solo games, using a pack of 40 cards (the 8's, 9's and 10's being removed). Developed in southern France in the late 17th century, it took off in Paris and London in the early 19th century, it being "to the good taste of the French nation" and to women, principally of the middle and upper classes, among whom it became their favourite game.[1] Having become "one of the great European games for about a hundred years" by the mid-19th century, Quadrille had fallen out of fashion, superseded by Whist and Boston.[2]

  1. ^ M.V.D. (1752), p. iv.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Parlett was invoked but never defined (see the help page).