"The king of all German card games ... it posesses the undisputable advantage that skill and luck interdepend in the same way as winning or losing is decided", written by the newspaper Osterländer Blätter in 1818. This quote referred to a game which was invented in Thuringian Altenburg: Skat. It spread quickly in Germany.
The company and the game are deeply rooted in Altenburg. The Skat mecca of Altenburg is where playing card fans from all over the world have been coming for ages in oder to babtize their cards in the Skat Fountain, to visit the Skat museum or, in the case of a dispute, to call the international Skat court. The brothers Otto and Bernhard Bechstein opened their "Ducal Saxon Altenburgian Playing Card Factory" in 1832.
This production site and its long tradition of making cards has been running to this day. The playing card factory Altenburg Ltd. with its highly modern manufacturing plant now belongs to Carta Mundi, the biggest corporate group for playing cards with headquarters in Belgium, and is, by a wide margin, the market leader in Germany. In addition to our traditional playing cards for the toy and stationary retail market, we fill the high demand of playing cards in the advertising industry and cooperate intensively with game publishers.
Königsfurt-Urania GmbH
