Victorian Vice- Faro

Whether it’s their main table or tucked in a corner, every Victorian gambling hall has a Faro (pronounced as the word “Pharaoh) table. The homonymic name stems from the game’s origin in the French court of Louis the XVI. Their standard deck featured cards depicting an Egyptian pharaoh. Faro spread to every saloon, gaming club across Europe and America in the 1800s. Punters (as Faro players are called) of all social classes crowd around the gaming table because of its simple rules and easily understood odds. Faro tables are generally square with a spot for the dealer cut out. The center of the table holds depictions of the thirteen types of cards in a suite (ace, two, three, etc all the way to king, excluding jokers). They might be painted on felt or the entire suite of spades glued to a wooden board.

At the start of a turn, punters place their stakes on their chosen cards. The dealer then draws the top card of a standard fifty-two card deck and places it on his right. This is the winning card. He then draws the losing card and places it on his left. Any punter lucky enough to bet on the winning card receives a payout equal to his stake (in other words a shilling bet wins a shilling). Those placing their faith on the losing card lose their stake. Gamblers whose cards neither won nor lost neither won nor lost their money. After payouts switched hands, new players joined the game, old players left, and stakes shifted from one card to another before the next round begins.

For further complication, punters may flip the game on its head by placing a marker next to their wager indicating that they are betting on that card to lose. If it wins, they lose their stake. If it loses, they win. Punters may also spread their stakes across multiple cards. A game of faro ends with one last bet over the order of the final three cards in the deck (ignoring the absolute last card which was revealed previously at the beginning of the game). If a punter guesses the order of all three cards he wins four-to-one. Guessing two of the three pays out two-to-one, and guessing one pays out one-to-one.

Among table games, Faro has the best odds unless the dealer cheats. To discourage cheating or to appear more honest despite cheating, faro begins by the dealer shuffling the deck, a punter cutting the cards, and the dealer revealing the card at the bottom of the deck. The deck was also kept in a special spring-fed box allowing the top cards to be pulled out one by one with little chance of manipulation. A small device similar to an abacus called “the case-keeper” recorded what cards had already been revealed from the deck and which cards remained. Despite these safeguards, few dealers played an honest table. Some dealers cheated with special decks designed to keep pairs of cards stuck together during a thorough shuffle. The box holding the cards could be altered allowing the dealer to pull certain cards at their whim. At a noisy and crowded table, a fellow conspirator could easily slide a wager from a winning card to a loser. In spite of widespread cheating, Faro’s quick and easy play, the comradery of punters eagerly tracking the deck’s progress, and the sudden wins and losses made it the most popular table game in Victorian England.

Faro in Play

To simulate an entire game of faro with a single test, the punter makes a Gambling test with 3 black dice. On a successful roll, they win an amount equal to their wager. For every net success, the punter wins another amount equal to their original wager. They break even with a partial success and lose their wager on a failure.

If the table is crooked, the punter’s roll remains the same, but the dealer makes a Gambling, or Mental competence test opposing the gambler.