My criteria would be:
0. Dates don't matter.
1. Designed by (Uncredited) (though some exceptions exist).
2. In the public domain.
3. Uses a "traditional" deck (any widely produced "standard" deck that has ever been widely used. 32-card decks, 36-card decks, 40-card decks, 52-card decks, tarot decks, double, triple, quadruple decks, etc.)
3a. I would automatically disqualify Rook for its being copyrighted and its attempt to insist that it can only be played with a special custom commercial deck.

Games are 'performed' collaboratively. (We could simply say 'played' just as actors are sometimes called 'players'. I do prefer the term 'play' because playing a game is for the sake of the players. Performing a 'play' is most often, maybe always, for the sake of the audience. They're probably out there, but I don't know of any theatre group that does not perform to an audience. I've made the comparison of games to scripts before, in that both require participants to bring the 'text' into reality, but games are a unique media in that they are not simply read, watched, analyzed. They are closest to plays, maybe, but, if so, they are plays performed primarily, almost exclusively, for the players themselves. To be the 'audience' of a game is to be the 'player' of a game.)

This reply in that thread is quite interesting:

The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

The most basic level of experience suggests that the rules of a game are something inherent in the game itself - or, more accurately (since a game is essentially a mode of behaviour), an abstraction existing in the minds of all its players. They are expressed in words every time someone describes a game or explains how to play it. Not everyone will have exactly the same understanding or grasp of the game, so they're unlikely to transmit their knowledge in exactly the same form of words. These rules are therefore not a known quantity but an average of all the understandings of all the players. As such, they may contain inconsistencies. The totality of rules of all but the simplest games are not exactly a cloud of unknowing, but could be described as a cloud of fuzzy knowing. In telling you how the game is played, they serve to establish its identity formal . Huizinga, in Homo Ludens, says "Every game has its rules"; but I would go further and say "Every game is its rules, for they are what define it".