What is "conquian"

Conquian \Con"qui*an\, n. (Card Playing) A game for two, played with 40 cards, in which each player tries to form three or four of a kind or sequences.

n. A card game, an ancestor of rummy.

Conquian is a rummy style card game. David Parlett describes it as an ancestor to all modern rummy games, and a kind of proto- Gin Rummy.

The games origins are disputed. Some believe the game originated in Spain hundreds of years ago, and was then brought to Mexico. Others believe the game originated in Mexico in the mid-1800s. It was first described as Coon Can in 1887 and then in detail in R. F. Foster's Hoyle in 1897. Parlett notes that the 1920s American card-game writer Robert F. Foster “traces Conquian back to the early 1860s.”

The name is thought to either derive from "con quién" – Spanish "with whom", or from the Chinese game Kon Khin, a variation of the earlier game Khanhoo. It is sometimes corrupted to Coon Can, Councan, Conca and Cuncá, a South American variation of the game. In 19th-century Mexican literature the word is spelled cunquián, showing thus it has nothing to do with the phrase "¿Con quién?". It is much more tempting to relate Conquian to the 19th-century Philippine card game Kungkian, or Kungkiyang, which Ilocano and Cebuano dictionaries define as "A card game, the same as pañggiñggí [i.e. Panguingue], except that there are only two players."