A dedicated deck card game is one played with a deck specific to that game, rather than a pack of standard playing cards. Educational packs of cards were being printed by the late eighteenth century, initially designed merely to inform, but later becoming playable games. Modern card games are often sold with non-standard distributions of suits and ranks.

Cuccù or Cucù ("Cuckoo") is an Italian card game, over 300 years old, that is playable by two to twenty players and which uses a special pack of 40 cards. It is a comparing game in which there is only one winner, and is unusual in that each player only receives one card.