Tarot, tarock, tarocchi, (and various other spellings) are a group of card games that are played with a tarot deck. The basic rules first appeared in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona, written before 1425. The game of Tarot is known in many variations, mostly cultural and regional.

The pack with which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot is called Tarocco in Italian, Tarock in German and various similar words in other languages. Tarot games spread to most parts of Europe, notable exceptions being the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and the Balkans. Contrary to popular belief, Tarot cards did not precede ordinary playing cards, and they were invented not for occult but for purely gaming purposes. Only later were they used for cartomancy and divination, and also as a field for artists to display specific iconographies, often connected to some ideological system. Concrete forms appear at least since the article of Court de Gebelin in the year 1781.

Tarocchi (Italian, plural form of Tarocco), and similar names in other languages, is a specific form of playing card deck used for different trick-taking games. This earlier name of the game is first documented in February 1442, Ferrara.

A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card games played with traditional decks have formally standardized rules, but most are folk games whose rules vary by region, culture, and person.

Many games that are not generally placed in the family of card games do in fact use cards for some aspect of their gameplay. Similarly, some games that are placed in the card game genre involve a board. The distinction is that the gameplay of a card game primarily depends on the use of the cards by players (the board is simply a guide for scorekeeping or for card placement), while board games (the principal non-card game genre to use cards) generally focus on the players' positions on the board, and use the cards for some secondary purpose.

A card game is played with a deck or pack of playing cards which are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. Normally the backs of the cards are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards may all be unique, or there can be duplicates. The composition of a deck is known to each player. In some cases several decks are shuffled together to form a single pack or shoe.

The tarot ( /ˈtæroʊ/; first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi, tarock, and others) is a pack of playing cards (most commonly numbering 78), used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play a group of card games such as Italian tarocchini and French tarot. From the late 18th century until the present time the tarot has also found use by mystics and occultists in efforts at divination or as a map of mental and spiritual pathways.

The tarot has four suits (which vary by region, being the French suits in Northern Europe, the Latin suits in Southern Europe, and the German suits in Central Europe). Each of these suits has pip cards numbering from ace to ten and four face cards for a total of 14 cards. In addition, the tarot is distinguished by a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool. Depending on the game, the Fool may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit.

François Rabelais gives tarau as the name of one of the games played by Gargantua in his Gargantua and Pantagruel; this is likely the earliest attestation of the French form of the name.^{[citation needed]} Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play card games. In English-speaking countries, where these games are largely unknown, tarot cards are now used primarily for divinatory purposes. Occultists call the trump cards and the Fool "the major arcana" while the ten pip and four court cards in each suit are called minor arcana. The cards are traced by some occult writers to ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah but there is no documented evidence of such origins or of the usage of tarot for divination before the 18th century.