Red Joker

Many packs add two jokers, printed differently to tell apart. Jokers are extras on top of the 52 suited cards, and a pack often has one full-colour and one single-colour joker. Some games rank one joker above the other. Unicode encodes three: 🂿 red, 🃏 black and 🃟 white, so decks with a third joker can be written down too.

Only 🃏 is an emoji, shown as colourful artwork on most phones. 🂿 is drawn by your text font, often as a small card outline in the text colour, so the "red" is in its name and not always on screen. Phone emoji keyboards don't offer it, and an older font may show an empty box.

Where did the joker card come from?

American Euchre players added it in the 1850s. Euchre is a trick-taking game where the trump suit beats the others, still a favourite across the US Midwest, and the extra card, called the Best Bower, was its highest trump. By 1875 poker players were using the joker as a wild card, the role most people know today. The name may come from Jucker, a German forerunner of Euchre, but that is uncertain. The tarot Fool is sometimes called the joker's ancestor; historians dispute that link.