Ganjifa

Ganjifa is a 4-player trick-taking card game played with 96 circular cards - 8 suits of 12 ranks each. You play as South against three AI opponents: West, North, and East.

Reading a Card

Traditional ganjifa decks are called "eight-color" because you recognise a card's suit by the painted color of the whole disc - not by a corner symbol. Each card here follows that convention:

• The painted ground - the entire disc is flooded with the suit's own color (soot black, ochre, leaf green, indigo-slate, plum, chocolate, cinnabar red, conch white). That ground color is the suit.
• The dark rim band - a soot border with fine gold and white rings, the darbari convention of court painting. Court cards gain an extra gold ring and a ring of tiny gold dots. A small rank index sits on the rim (real cards carry no numerals - this is a digital aid): M = Mir (rank 12, the King - highest card in any suit), V = Vizier (rank 11, the Minister - second highest), 1–10 = pip cards in descending power (10 beats 9, down to 1 which is lowest).
• The symbols - pip cards (1-10) show that many repeated suit symbols in a rosette; court cards (Mir, Vizier) are little miniature paintings of an enthroned ruler or a minister on horseback.

The 8 Suits

Each suit represents a theme from the Mughal imperial court:

• ⬛ Ghulam (lamp-soot black) - Servant. Mir = enthroned ruler under a canopy, Vizier = a minister mounted on horseback.
• 🟡 Taj (ochre) - Crown. The motif shows a jeweled crown, symbol of imperial authority.
• 🟢 Shamshir (leaf green) - Sword. The motif shows a curved Mughal scimitar blade with a crossguard.
• 🔵 Qimash (indigo-slate) - Cloth. The motif shows draped fabric waves, representing the textile trade central to Mughal commerce.
• 🟣 Qulaba (plum) - Harness. The motif shows a circular bridle ring with spokes, representing the imperial stables.
• 🟤 Chang (chocolate) - Harp. The motif shows an arched harp with strings, representing music at the Mughal court.
• 🔴 Surkh (cinnabar red) - Gold Coins. The motif shows stacked coin discs, representing the imperial treasury.
• ⬜ Safed (conch white) - Silver Ingot. The motif shows a trapezoid ingot bar, representing silver wealth.

How a Round Works

1. Trump suit: Determined automatically from the South hand each round - the suit of South's highest-ranked card (first Mir, then Vizier, else random). Shown in the Trump panel on the right.
2. Leading: The leader plays any card to start a trick. That card's suit becomes the "led suit."
3. Following suit: You must play a card of the led suit if you have one. If not, play anything (including trump).
4. Winning a trick: Only trump and led-suit cards can win. Highest trump wins; if no trump played, highest led-suit card wins. Cards of other suits can never win, no matter how high their rank.
5. Trick winner leads next. 24 tricks per round.
6. Scoring: 1 point per trick won. Win all 24 = +5 slam bonus. First to 50 points across rounds wins.

Controls

• Hover a card to enlarge it and see the suit clearly.
• Click once to select (gold ring appears, card lifts). Click again to play it.
• Dimmed cards are illegal to play this turn. Hover them to inspect, but only bright cards can be played.

Ganjifa traces its roots to Persian ganjifeh playing cards, brought into India under the early Mughals. The emperor Babur recorded sending a ganjifa set to a friend in 1527 - one of the first firm references to the game in India. The name derives from the Persian word for "playing cards."

Unlike European playing cards made of paper, Ganjifa cards were circular discs hand-crafted from lacquered cotton cloth, ivory, or tortoiseshell, then painted by court artists with extraordinary detail. Crucially, the suit of a card is read from the painted color of its whole face - the standard deck is the "eight-color" (ath-rangi) set, and the backs are plain solid lacquer. Because the stiff lacquered discs cannot be riffled like paper cards, players mix them face-down on a floor-cloth rather than shuffling.

This table uses the secular Mughal court suits - crowns, swords, coins, silver, cloth, harps, harness and servants - rather than the religious Dashavatara Ganjifa of Odisha, whose 10 suits depict the ten avatars of Vishnu. Both traditions descend from the same Persian root.

The craft nearly vanished, but it survives. In Maharashtra the Bhonsle royal family revived Sawantwadi ganjifa painting in the 1970s, and in January 2024 Sawantwadi ganjifa was awarded a Geographical Indication (GI) tag recognising it as a protected regional craft. A handful of artisans in Odisha and Maharashtra still paint each card by hand with natural pigments and lacquer.