The short, honest history of Speed
Chess has a thousand years of books. Poker has museums. Speed has a kid at a lunch table saying "no, no, that's not how we play it."
Nobody knows who came up with Speed, or when. No patent, no publisher, no first edition. The people who catalogue card games for a living list its rules carefully and its origin not at all, because there is nothing on record to list.
What we can say is when it shows up in print. A 1973 book of card games for children, Margie Golick's Deal Me In!, describes it under the name Spit and calls it a game "more familiar to children" than to adults. So by the early seventies it was already old news on the playground, and the grown-ups were only just noticing.
It has never had one name. David Parlett's Penguin Book of Card Games files it as Spit and notes it is also called Speed. Plenty of people grew up calling it Slam. They are close cousins rather than one game:
Ask ten people which is which and you will get eleven answers, and a twelfth game called California Speed that is something else again.
Card historians put Speed in a family called competitive patience: games that take the solitaire idea of building piles in order, and let two people do it at once on the same piles. No turns. Fastest hands win.
The family is older than Speed. Its best-documented member is Racing Demon, which Parlett traces to England in the 1890s. It was being written up in Punch in 1933, and it crossed to America the next year as Pounce. Today most people know it as Nerts. Speed looks like the two-player, stripped-down, play-it-anywhere branch of that tree, though nobody has drawn the line between them on paper.
Here is the part that matters. Speed has no rulebook, so it spreads the only way it can: someone shows you. An older cousin. A kid on the bus. Somebody at camp. And whoever teaches you teaches you their version.
That is why every table plays it a little differently. Doubles count here, not there. Jokers are wild at this school and banned at that one. Some people slap the piles. Some people shout the name when they win, and will tell you that you lost if you forgot.
None of those are wrong. They are house rules, and house rules are the whole tradition.
We did not want to pick one official version and tell everyone else they had been playing it wrong. So every spot on the block plays its own way, the way real tables do. Doubles at the park. Wild jokers at the laundromat. Slaps on the stoop. Learn the house rule, respect the house rule, beat the regular at their own game.
It is the most honest way we could think of to put a folk game on a screen.
We kept to what is documented and said so where it is not.
The link between Racing Demon and Speed is our reading of the family resemblance, not something a source states. The stories about cousins, buses and camp are how people tell us they learned it, not history.