deck-16-10

A busy month! After Prague Miriam needed a new pc and Joop bought a tablet. On both programs had to be installed and files had to be transferred. Together with a busy social life it left little time to follow all the usual Ebay sites.
This has led to a rather disappointingly short, not very interesting shortlist. So nothing really worth mentioning here.

An indication of the poor situation is the nature of this month's winner. It's a card game, which had a deck of cards that -fortunately- can be used for our kind of card games, like poker or bridge, too.
The game is called "Transcott" and it's packed in an oversized box.

We have bought this deck on the French Ebay. The box shows a Lockheed Super Constellation, popularly called "Connie", and the subtitle of the Transcott game is "jeu des routes du ciel". It reveals the goal of the game: gathering different routes in the sky. There are 2 extra cards, that mention (the same) 7 different routes. Besides the deck of cards, there's a booklet with rules for the game and a map of the world, on which the different routes are depicted. But for us this deck was the only reason to buy the game.
The deck is printed in offset, but the manufacturer is unknown. The quality of printing, used card and rounded corners would point to a reasonably experienced manufacturer. The game was probably published in the early 1950's.

There are no indices on the courts, but kings, queens and jacks are easily recognized: there's a captain, stewardess and mechanic.

All the pip cards have a number in each corner, but the courts only have a suit sign in 2 corners. These are on the right side, so only visible for left handed players.

Only the aces don't have a destination, all the other pip cards have a certain destination. Only Paris and Karachi have 2 numbers. This means that these cities

are destinations in 2 routes. The aces function a bit like jokers in other games. They can be used to replace any missing card in a route to complete that route.


Each suit has its own color and uniforms. Not certain if they correspond with existing airline personnel uniforms in those days.