Commerce
An 18th-century French vying game where players trade cards with a shared table pool to build the best three-card combination — a likely ancestor of Whisky Poker.
Coming soon — not yet playable
Rules
Commerce, with rules recorded by 1769, is played with three cards dealt to each player and three additional cards dealt face up to the center of the table as a shared pool. On their turn, a player may exchange one of their cards for one of the pool cards (placing their discard face up in its place), trying to improve toward the best possible three-card combination.
Recognized hand categories include a "tricon" (three of a kind, the best hand), a "sequence" (three cards in suited sequence), and a simple point total of same-suited cards for weaker hands — categories that echo the pair/straight/flush logic later standardized in poker.
Once players are satisfied with their hand (or the pool stops improving anyone's options), a showdown determines the winner, sometimes preceded by a simple betting round depending on the table.
Historical note: Commerce's card-exchange-with-a-shared-pool mechanic is cited by gaming historians as a likely direct ancestor of Whisky Poker (also in this library), an actual poker variant that uses the same trading-with-a-widow idea.
Strategy notes: Because cards are exchanged openly with a visible pool rather than drawn blind from a deck, Commerce rewards tracking exactly what's been discarded and by whom, in a way that has more in common with Rummy-family reasoning than pure poker-style hidden-information betting.
Common house rules
No betting, pure showdown version
Some historical accounts describe Commerce as played purely for the showdown (like a card-trading race) with no betting at all — decide before playing whether your table wants to add poker-style betting rounds on top.
Try Whisky Poker for the poker-adjacent version
For a version of this same card-trading idea that's explicitly a poker variant with real betting, see Whisky Poker (also in this library), Commerce's more direct poker-family descendant.
Pool refills only from discards
Standard rule: the three-card center pool is only replenished by players' own discards during exchanges, not redealt from the deck mid-hand, keeping the total pool of visible information consistent.
Related games
Based on shared category, origin, and rules that reference each other.
Ambigu
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A once-massively popular banking card game (also called Pharaoh) that dominated American and European gambling halls for over two centuries, simplifying Basset's mechanic into a fast, simple bet-on-a-card game.
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