Quincy’s Forgotten Game Inventor: The Maine Street Man Who Created His Own Card Game in 1893
More than 130 years ago, retired Quincy accountant Homer D. Catlin believed he had solved a problem card players did not know they had. From an address on Maine Street, he created and published a new game called “Guest,” which he boldly declared superior to both Whist and Euchre.
Long before video games, game consoles and modern tabletop conventions, a Quincy man was trying to reinvent the way people played cards.
His name was Homer D. Catlin, and in 1893 he published a slim volume titled Catlin’s Historic Origin of the Playing Cards. The first half of the book offered Catlin’s own theories about the history and symbolism of playing cards. The second half introduced something entirely his own: a new card game he called “Guest.”
Catlin was not modest about what he had created. He described Guest as a “new, original and scientific game” intended for families, social gatherings and home entertainment. He believed it struck the perfect balance between two of the most popular card games of the era, Whist and Euchre.
In Catlin’s estimation, Whist was too long and exhausting. Euchre was too short and repetitive. Guest, he argued, took the best parts of both and created something more balanced.
He even reduced his opinion to three words of comparison: Whist was good, Euchre was better and Guest was best.
A Quincy invention from Maine Street
What makes Catlin’s book especially interesting locally is the address printed prominently inside it.
He identified himself as:
H. D. Catlin, Author, No. 817 Maine Street, Quincy, Illinois.
The Library of Congress lists the book as having been published in Quincy in 1893, and Catlin registered it for copyright protection that same year.
That puts a locally created game squarely in downtown Quincy more than a century ago.
Today, The Butcher Block operates at 819 Maine Street, immediately adjacent to the address Catlin listed in his book. Whether Catlin’s exact 817 address was later absorbed into or renumbered as part of the present downtown property footprint would require a deeper look at old Sanborn maps and city directories, but the location places his work on the same block now occupied by one of downtown Quincy’s familiar businesses.
It is an unusual connection between two very different eras of Maine Street.
In 1893, a retired accountant at that address was trying to convince the public that he had invented the next great card game.
A retired accountant turns game designer
Catlin wrote that he had spent more than two years studying, revising and perfecting Guest before publishing its rules.
He described himself as a retired accountant, bookkeeper and cashier with about 40 years of experience. That background appears to have shaped the game considerably.
Catlin repeatedly described Guest in mathematical and bookkeeping terms. He talked about balances, credits, deposits and even compared the scoring system to double-entry bookkeeping.
That is one of the more distinctive features of the game.
Catlin did not simply see Guest as entertainment. He saw it as orderly, logical and almost mathematical in its construction. In his mind, it was a game that rewarded attention, memory and disciplined play rather than luck alone.
He also believed card games could serve a wholesome social purpose. Throughout the book, Catlin pushed back against the idea that playing cards were inherently associated with gambling or vice. He argued that they could instead provide moral, social and family entertainment if used responsibly.
For Catlin, Guest was intended to be played around a family table, not in a gambling hall.
So how did “Guest” work?
The game was designed for four players divided into two partnerships.
It began with a standard 52-card deck, but the 2s, 3s, 4s and 5s were removed. That left 36 ordinary cards. A Joker was then added, bringing the total to 37.
Each player received nine cards.
That left one extra card, and that odd card determined the trump suit for the hand. Catlin called that card the “gift of the Guest.”
The exposed card itself did not belong to either partnership and had no scoring value. Its purpose was simply to establish trump.
The first lead was required to be a trump card whenever possible. After that, play worked much like Whist or Euchre. Players followed suit when they could, while trump could be used when a player could not follow the suit that had been led.
The Joker ranked as an important trump card, and Catlin also borrowed the right and left bower system familiar to Euchre.
Each hand produced nine tricks.
Instead of simply awarding one point per trick, the partners compared the number of tricks won by each side. The lower total was subtracted from the higher total, and the difference became the winning partnership’s score for that hand.
For example, if one partnership won six tricks and the other won three, the winning side would receive three points.
A full game was played to 13 points.
If a partnership scored beyond 13, the excess points could carry over into the next game, a system Catlin called a “lapse.”
It was an unusual mixture of Euchre, Whist and Catlin’s own accounting-inspired scoring system.
Guest in simple terms
For modern players who might actually want to try it, the basic game can be summarized this way:
Four players form two teams. Remove all 2s through 5s from a normal deck, add one Joker, and deal nine cards to each player. The final extra card establishes trump. Trump must lead the first trick if possible. Players then follow suit when able, with the Joker and bowers holding special strength in the trump suit. After nine tricks, subtract the losing team’s trick total from the winning team’s total. The difference is added to the winners’ score. The first partnership to reach 13 points wins.
Catlin intended the rules to combine the strategy of Whist with the faster pace of Euchre.
Whether it actually succeeded is something modern Quincy card players could decide for themselves.
Catlin thought he had created something revolutionary
The most entertaining part of Catlin’s writing is his confidence.
He called Guest “perfection perfected” and repeatedly insisted that the game could not be improved upon. He wrote that experienced Whist and Euchre players who had tried Guest considered it superior.
He also maintained that there could be only three truly original card games: Whist, Euchre and Guest.
Everything else, in his estimation, was merely imitation.
That claim may have been ambitious, but it also reveals how seriously Catlin viewed his invention. He was not presenting Guest as a novelty or parlor trick. He believed he had developed a legitimate new game worthy of standing alongside card games that had already been played for generations.
More than 130 years later, Whist and Euchre remain familiar names.
Guest largely disappeared.
A forgotten piece of Quincy gaming history
Catlin died in 1898, only a few years after publishing the game.
His invention never appears to have achieved the widespread popularity he imagined, and today few people in Quincy would recognize the name Guest.
Yet the game itself survived in an unexpected way.
Catlin’s book eventually entered the collections of the Library of Congress and was later digitized, preserving both his theories on playing cards and the complete rules of his invention.
That means a game designed in downtown Quincy in the 1890s can still be played today exactly as Catlin intended.
For a city with a surprisingly rich connection to gaming, from modern indie video game developers to decades of tabletop gaming through QuinCon, Catlin pushes that history much farther back than most people would expect.
Quincy had a game designer in 1893.
He lived on Maine Street.
He believed he had invented a game better than Euchre.
And while history did not quite agree with his prediction, Homer D. Catlin left behind something remarkably tangible: a complete original game created in Quincy, published in Quincy and still preserved more than a century later.
That alone makes Guest worth another deal.
