I’d seen Rook decks for sale before, but I never really knew what the game was about:
The Rook deck was introduced in 1906 by Parker Brothers for use in Fundamentalist Protestant Christian communities such as the Mennonites where decks of playing cards are regarded as ‘the Devil’s picture-book’.Instead of French suits, Rook cards use the colours black, green, red, and yellow. Cards are numbered from 1 to 14 in each colour, and there is one Joker-like card called the Rook, bearing a picture of that bird.
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Central European Jews were also forbidden by religious law to play with the standard deck, and developed a similar alternative deck called Kvitlech or Kvitlakh, produced commercially by Piatnik as Quitli. It contains cards with numbers but without suits.
Pit has a similar history:
Three classic PARKER BROTHERS card games — PIT, FLINCH and ROOK — were introduced in the early 1900s. Since bridge was banned by millions of conservative American families, George Parker saw the need for a substitute card game that would not be associated with gambling. PIT, introduced in 1904, involved moneymaking and trading to corner the markets on various grains. It had, and still has, the excitement of a regular card game, but the individual cards depicting grains with point values avoid any gambling connections.FLINCH soon followed PIT, and for a time outsold all other card games ever published because of the great variety of games that could be played using the special cards.
In 1906 the most successful card game ever published by PARKER BROTHERS made its appearance — ROOK. Alternately a simple game for children or a challenging one for adults, it was not an immediate success. But by 1913 it had become the best-selling game in the country. More than 55 million decks have been sold since 1906.