Talk:The king of hearts has five sons

History of the game
This is fascinating as a potential precursor to Cluedo, but are there any sources for it existing beyond Bruno Faidutti giving it a paragraph in a Games Journal article, and when asked saying all I know about this game is that I met some american guy who told me "I played this in school before WWII, which means before Clue was invented, and here is how it played...."

Cats At Cards has a detailed and convincing writeup but it may not pre-date this Wikipedia article (archive.org has no copy of it going back that far). Lord Belbury (talk) 14:24, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Cats At Cards
Per the section above, is there any danger of citogenesis in expanding the rules according to catsatcards.com and is the neighbour repeats the question to the next player on the left the only rule being sourced from there?

More generally, is this anonymous website considered to be a reliable source for card game rules? Belbury (talk) 15:48, 21 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Well those are good questions. I translated this from German Wikipedia which cited the article on deduction games also used here (I've just updated the link as it had been archived). However, it must have had another source as the rules were elaborated in more detail. I think that source was catsatcards.com since some of the text appears to be a close translation. So I think the answer to your first question is that it cannot be citogenesis since catsatcards.com is a far more elaborate description and the Wiki articles are derivatives at most. In fact, they only describe the "alternate rules" version at catsatcards.com, which perhaps ought to be corrected.
 * That in turn gives rise to your second question, which I'm not sure we can answer definitively. On the one hand, catsatcards.com seems to have access either to original information or to reliable sources; on the other hand, it doesn't give its sources, but instead claims copyright on its articles. It may be worth contacting the authors to see if they can enlighten us. On the other hand that may put the cats among the pigeons! Bermicourt (talk) 17:29, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Inspecting the page history, the German Wikipedia article was written in full in 2007, citing only Faidutti's Games Journal article as its source. Catsatcards.com wasn't registered as a domain until 2015.
 * I don't know if Catsatcards is researching deeper sources or applying original game design to fill the gaps and improve the gameplay, but given how minimally recorded this historical game is, I think we should break up the rules into the Faidutti version and the Catsatcards amendments, if it's possible to do so cleanly. Belbury (talk) 07:33, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Sounds fair. Bermicourt (talk) 18:52, 30 April 2023 (UTC)