Juckerspiel, also known as Jucker or Juckern, is a card game that was popular in the Alsace region. It is believed to be the ancestor of Euchre and may have given its name to the playing card known as the Joker. History The earliest known reference to the game occurs in 1792 in a German dictionary where it is described as "a game with cards" and assigned to the Palatinate region. By 1848 it was well known enough for Spindler to mention it in his Vergißmeinnicht ("Forget-me-Not"), in which a young man gambles his time away in pubs playing various games including Jucker ([er] juckert). In Erckmann-Chatrian's 1864 novel L'ami Fritz, set in Alsace, there are frequent references in French to playing the game of youker as far back as the 1830s. In 1856, Hackländer recounts playing Juckern, a new game to him, in the Rhineland region. The game also appears in an 1874 book of poetry in the dialect of the Hunsrück region of Germany in 1874 and in an article in a Palatinate newspaper that same year as played socially by ordinary folk alongside Tarock. No complete rules have been found, but Martin and Lienhart (1899) describe Juckerspiel as a "card game in which the Bauer [Jack] is worth more than the Ace" and a Marsch was to take all five tricks in Juckerspiel. Rausch (1908) states that Juckerspiel was widespread in Alsace and e Marsch mache means to take all the tricks and that the Bauer is the highest card. Modern sources state that the game was played in the Rhineland and the South Hessian region. Euchre ancestor Jucker has been suggested as the ancestor of the popular American game, Euchre, on the basis of chronology, linguistics and mode of play. 19th century American sources show that eucre was being played as early as 1810 and that by 1829, as uker, itn was played with Bowers as early as 1829 in the American Mid-West, and that Euchre was invented in America during the 1820s from the mixing of Ecarte with ideas from German card games by German immigrants. Bumppo (1999) refutes the "canard" of a link with Ecarté pointing out that the two games emerged at roughly the same time and that Ecarté is a two-handed game in which Jacks are not the top trumps. David Parlett, an expert on the history of card games, goes further