A card painter’s workshop in Vienna’s 7th district.

Piatnik dates itself to 1824, and its website still carries the line “good games since 1824.” That year, according to English and German Wikipedia, the card maker Anton Moser set up a card-painting business in Vienna’s 7th district. After Moser’s death, Ferdinand Piatnik, a Hungarian-born colleague, took over the workshop and, English Wikipedia says, later married Moser’s widow.

The Wien Geschichte Wiki, the City of Vienna’s historical encyclopaedia, gives the paperwork: Piatnik received his trade licence on 30 January 1843 and ran the business first as “Ferdinand Piatnik vormals Anton Moser” — formerly Anton Moser — and from 1846 as “Ferdinand Piatnik in Wien.” The city’s wiki therefore dates the firm itself from 1843, while the company counts from Moser’s start in 1824.

In 1862 Piatnik bought a building on Kaiserstraße, still in the 7th district, and moved production there as card making shifted from hand work to machines. In 1882 his sons joined the firm, which took the name Ferd. Piatnik & Söhne; after his death in 1885, his widow and sons carried it on. In 1891 the company built a new factory in Baumgarten, on what is now Hütteldorfer Straße in the 14th district, where it is still based.

Budapest, Prague and a family company.

Expansion followed across the Habsburg lands. In 1896 the firm bought a playing-card works in Budapest and ran it as a sister company, Piatnik Nándor és Fiai, according to the Wien Geschichte Wiki. Between 1897 and 1912 it gradually took over the Viennese card maker Joseph Glanz, and through Glanz in 1899 it acquired Ritter & Co. of Prague. The city’s wiki adds a book and lithographic printing works in 1903, which let the firm print other matter too, a paper mill at Ratschach in 1907 and, in 1911, an enlarged Vienna works whose modern factory building still stands.

The same source notes a family detail that can confuse collectors: Ferdinand’s brother Ignaz Piatnik also made playing cards in Vienna between 1858 and 1866, with no connection to Ferdinand’s business. After the First World War the company set up “Piatnik, Ritter & Co.” in Prague so that it could produce there directly, and in 1926 it opened its own factory in Kraków, the city’s wiki says.

The legal form changed with the generations. In 1917 the Vienna firm became a family joint-stock company, the Erste Österreichische Spielkartenfabrik AG, Ferdinand Piatnik & Söhne; in 1939 it was converted into a family limited partnership under the name it still uses, Wiener Spielkartenfabrik Ferd. Piatnik & Söhne, according to the city’s wiki and Wikipedia.

After the Second World War the range widened. Wikipedia says multicolour offset printing arrived in 1951, board games were added in 1956 and puzzles have been produced since 1966. The first foreign subsidiary, Piatnik of America, followed in 1989, and sales companies in Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary came later. German Wikipedia names the managing directors as Dieter Strehl, a great-great-grandson of Ferdinand Piatnik, and Wolfgang Mayr-Kern.

The puzzle trade.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Clementoni, Educa, Schmidt Spiele, Piatnik, Trefl, Wentworth and Liberty Puzzles. Puzzle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger toy and games groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a toy shop to a museum gift store.

A puzzle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single picture than by a box, a name and the way its pieces are cut, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its puzzles are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its puzzles are made and how its boxes have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A jockey on the box and cards made in Vienna.

Piatnik’s best-known mark is a horse with a jockey. German Wikipedia records that in 2016 the logo on its game boxes was changed: it still shows the horse and rider in a white circle, but that circle no longer sits in a yellow triangle — it now sits in a red circle. No official typeface or colour specification is published.

The company describes itself as a Vienna-based publisher and manufacturer of board games, playing cards and puzzles, and German Wikipedia says most of its products are made at the Vienna site. Its card range covers Austrian and international games, from Schnapsen and Tarock to bridge and poker, alongside art and collectors’ packs. Its games include the party game Activity, released in 1990, and Tick Tack Bumm; German Wikipedia adds the quiz game Smart 10, launched in 2017, and the long-running family games DKT and Rummikub. Its puzzles are grouped by motif — art and paintings, cartoons, cities and attractions, and original designs.

The firm marked its 200th anniversary in 2024. German Wikipedia says the Austrian Post issued four special stamps designed to look like Piatnik Schnapsen cards, and that the jubilee products included a puzzle showing Vienna at the time of the company’s founding and a detective game, Crime Scene Vienna 1824. The city has its own reminder: Ferdinand-Piatnik-Weg, in the Penzing district, was named after the founder in 1997.

For a design guide, Piatnik shows how a playing-card maker’s long history — the red of the pips, the cream of pasteboard, a jockey on the box — can carry across cards, games and puzzles; compare Schmidt Spiele, another German-language games house, and Educa. For this guide we use red, cream and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Piatnik’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.