Johann Kaspar Hechtel was a businessman and brass-factory owner and game publisher in Nuremberg, a city that had supplied Europe with printed playing cards and board games for centuries. In 1799 his workshop issued Das Spiel der Hoffnung, the Game of Hope, printed by Bieling: a boxed race game in which players threw dice and moved counters along a track of thirty-six numbered, illustrated squares, some of them carrying consequences, the Ship sending a player forward, the Coffin sending one back, the Anchor holding one in place.
Hechtel died in 1799, the same year the game reached print, and it went on being advertised for two decades after his death. Nothing in the record credits him with any interest in fortune-telling. The game's own accompanying leaflet mentioned, as a secondary suggestion, that the cards could also be read for divination, but that was a note attached to a children's boxed game, not a system he devised or practiced himself.
What made the game durable was not the divinatory suggestion but its images and its arithmetic. Each of the thirty-six squares also carried a small inset of an ordinary playing card, and the thirty-six insets together make up a complete piquet pack, six through ace in four suits, the standard shortened deck used in German and French card play of the period. That doubling, a picture book laid over a working card deck, is what let the game's images migrate onto cards of their own a generation later.