Oct 11, 2015. German game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung (translated: The Game. Deck was printed in 2014 and is still sold as the Ur-Lenormand deck.
In my research of card games, I came across an old German game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung (translated: The Game of Hope). The interesting thing about this card game was that the cards were the board, not actually held in the hand and played. This was basically a travel parlor game like some other race games of the period.It was invented sometime around 1799 (some sources have been found that advertise it in 1798) by an inventor named Johann Kaspar Hechtel. The game consisted of a deck of 36 cards, numbered 1-36, with full-color pictures of an item per card (the original deck also had insets of normal playing cards at the top of the cards). The cards would be laid out in order 1-36, in rows of 6 cards. The players would roll two 6-sided dice and move their tokens according to their roll.
Depending on what card they landed on, they had to do different things like move forward or back cards, add money to the pot, or take it out. The person to reach card 35 first was the winner.After the death of a famous French mystic and fortune-teller, Marie Anne Lenormand, the deck was credited to her as the Lenormand cartomancy deck. But, she just used the Game of Hope deck and came up with readings from each card. There is still a copy of the original Game of Hope deck in the British Museum and a recreation of the deck was printed in 2014 and is still sold as the Ur-Lenormand deck. You can also just purchase a standard Petit Lenormand deck.If you would like to read the translated rules,.