The Evolution of RPGs: Yezi xi
A few centuries before the creation of the jiaozi and money-suited playing cards, the same woodblock printing methods had also been used to make folded leaflet rulebooks for a fairly complex Chinese tables game that was called yezi xi, the "Leaf Game". Confusingly for historians, this exact same term is used to refer to the early card games played with the new money-suited cards after 1000 CE, with the word "leaf" referring to the paper cards rather of the pages of the leaflet reference. Sadly, we don't know much about either game's rules except that the tables game was probably a precursor of Shengguantu (the Promotion Chart), and the card game was probably a precursor of Madiao ("Horse Passant", meaning a horse with one hoof raised up, which had a colloquial meaning of "three against one" in the same manner as the English phrase "king of the hill"). Madiao itself has both an elaborate history and elaborate rules, so it seems reasonable to infer that yezi xi was much simpler â making it probably the world's first trick-taking game, and maybe even the world's first hand comparison game.
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