Showing posts with label xin bin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label xin bin. Show all posts

Thursday, 10 October 2019

Character cards

Suliao Zipai (Plastic Character cards), Xin Bin ,  80+1c,
 塑料字牌, 鑫宾 80+1副

Yet another of the character cards. Although not explicitly known as such, the cards are probably manufactured to play the game 'Two-Seven-Ten", like one featured earlier in this blog.


The suit of large characters  When compared to other examples, the characters are printed in a font that is almost identical to normal print. 


The small suit.
The card marked A is 底換-- Di Huan.-- "Bottom/ Switch" 
Isao Umebayashi's article on the game Two-Ten-Seven ( The Playing-Card volume XXV No 4.), shows an image of a similar deck, which had a card with the same words (底/換) as the present card, except the words were written on opposite ends of the card. 
Mr. Umebayashi and his translator (George Hatton ) could not find the mandarin pronunciations of the characters. They had to make do with the Japanese and Cantonese pronunciations. 
The author remedies the defect below: 

 底=Soko (Japanese) = Tai (Cantonese)= Di (Mandarin)= Bottom
換= Kan (Japanese) = Oon (Cantonese) = Huan (Mandarin) = Switch


Cards that possess the extra bottom/switch card now seem to be quite rare.