Tarot cards are famous for being used by fortune tellers, but they were originally used to play games.
I created a high resolution tarot card deck using public domain images and some creations of my own. The main idea of the deck is that most of the cards are regular playing cards (Ace, Jack, Queen, King, etc.). A tarot deck technically uses a regular deck of cards plus 22 additional “trump” (major arcana) cards that have colorful images on them. The inspiration of this deck is that the regular cards look like the playing cards we are familiar with in the USA.
Trump cards
The trump cards look like the following:
The trump cards are from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck, which is currently in the public domain in the USA. High resolution images of those cards can be found here.
Cavaliers
The difficulty in making the regular Tarot cards look like regular playing cards is that the regular playing cards only have three court cards (the Jack, Queen, and King):
The Tarot deck uses has 56 regular cards because it has four court cards (the Jack, Cavalier, Queen, and King). The masterpiece of my Tarot deck is my unique Cavalier cards:
I made these cards in a hope that they would blend in with everything else. The cards are made using the face of some French knight (chevallier) cards and the Jack cards. See the knight cards here: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. The images for the other court cards (and the Ace of Spades) are in the public domain, and were created by Byron Knoll. The letters and the pip cards were created by Chris Aguilar who released his playing cards under a free GNU license.
The Joker card uses an image also in the public domain, which was originally found here.
Finally, I also included several “rule cards” to various combat-oriented card games that I’ve thought of. One of them requires tarot cards.
Downloads
PDF files of my Tarot deck can be downloaded by right clicking on these images (save link as):
Related:
- the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck
- Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Images
- Byron Knoll’s public domain playing cards
- Chris Aguilar’s free playing cards
- Joker image
These are really nicely done! Do you have any recommendations on material to print them on?
You can try cardstock or paste new images over other cards if they are a similar shape.