Amazingly effective game, apparently even turned into a movie not once but twice (Cry_Wolf and one Austrian adaption, according to de.wikipedia). That connection to an 18th century media hype adds an interesting new angle to the success of that game, in particular given how France is not exactly known as a big exporter of modern games except for that one.
(whereas in pre-modern games, there seems to be be a huge amount of frenchess everywhere. I guess that's still a consequence of the idleness enforced at Versailles and Europe's near-universal scramble to replicate?)
For example the suits of playing cards [0]: here in Germany we have our own suits, but those decks are really only used for some very specific games. For all other games, we use the same cards as the English speaking world and we call those French. For diamonds and spades even the French names remain, in heavily adapted spelling: Karo from carreau and Pik from pique.
What's funny is those Skat decks that are clearly the "normal" (French I guess hahah) suits, except with still only Skat number of cards and nonstandard colors. So it's 32 cards, and green/etc colors, but it replaces the bells and acorns.
That's like 90%+ of the skat decks I ever used, but it didn't occur to me that it was like halfway between original German deck and French deck
(whereas in pre-modern games, there seems to be be a huge amount of frenchess everywhere. I guess that's still a consequence of the idleness enforced at Versailles and Europe's near-universal scramble to replicate?)