Deutsches Spielkarten-Museum

The German Playing Card Museum in Leinfelden-Echterdingen south of Stuttgart is a branch of the Landesmuseum Wuerttemberg and holds one of Europe's largest public collections of playing cards. Over 30,000 card sets containing more than a million individual cards are archived here, from hand-painted Renaissance tarots to twentieth-century propaganda decks. The systematic collection grew out of the nineteenth-century emergence of ludology, the scholarly study of games. Visitors find curated displays on fortune-telling, regional suit symbols, advertising cards and the history of printing. A worthwhile stop for design enthusiasts and families with older kids who enjoy seeing visual history from an unusual angle.