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Briscola

Briscola is the Italian trump game, and the rule that makes it is the one it leaves out: there is no obligation to follow suit. Any card may be played to any trick. Three cards each, a card turned face up for trumps, and after every trick you both draw one and play on. Twenty of the forty cards are worth nothing at all, so the game is about which tricks you take rather than how many, and sixty-one of the hundred and twenty points wins it.

Play Briscola Leaderboard

The pack and the deal

  1. Two players, and a pack of forty cards: ace, three, king, queen, jack, seven, six, five, four and two in each suit. This site plays the French-suited forty, which is the standard pack with the eights, nines and tens taken out.
  2. Three cards each. The next card is turned face up and its suit is trumps for the whole deal.
  3. That turned up card stays in the game: it lies crosswise under the rest of the pack, which is the stock, and it is the last card anybody draws.
  4. Who leads the first trick comes from the seed, and the page tells you whose turn it is.

Playing a trick

  1. The leader plays any card. The other player answers with any card. There is no following suit and nothing in your hand is ever barred.
  2. The trick goes to the highest trump in it. If neither card is a trump, it goes to the higher card of the suit that was led.
  3. A card of a suit that was not led and is not a trump cannot win, whatever its rank. An ace thrown on a four of the led suit loses to the four.
  4. The winner of the trick takes both cards, and leads the next one.

The ranking

  1. Within a suit the order is ace, three, king, queen, jack, seven, six, five, four, two.
  2. The three sits second, above the king. That is the one thing every new player gets wrong, and it is the same order as the points.

What the cards are worth

  1. The ace is eleven, the three is ten, the king four, the queen three and the jack two. Everything else is nothing.
  2. That is thirty points in each suit and a hundred and twenty in the pack.
  3. Twenty of the forty cards are worth nothing, so half the deal is about giving away as little as possible.

Drawing

  1. After each trick both players draw one card, the winner first and the loser second, for as long as the stock lasts.
  2. The face up trump is the last card of the stock, so the loser of the seventeenth trick is the one who takes it.
  3. After that the stock is empty and the last three tricks are played out from the hand. The suit stays trumps to the end.

How it ends

  1. All twenty tricks are played. There is no early finish and nothing to claim.
  2. Count the cards you have taken: sixty-one or more of the hundred and twenty wins the game.
  3. Sixty all is a draw, and it happens about once in sixty deals.
  4. A resignation or a missed deadline ends the game against that player. Every move has the same deadline, chosen when the table is made.

Worth knowing before you start

  1. Leading an ace or a three is how beginners lose. Your opponent is never obliged to follow suit, so a high plain card led into a hand with a trump in it simply hands over the points.
  2. A trick with nothing in it is worth taking cheaply and worth losing cheaply. Spending a trump to win four points is usually a bad trade.
  3. Both players can see how many cards are left in the stock and how many the other has taken, so nothing has to be announced.
  4. The turned up trump is public all deal. Knowing which card will be drawn last is part of the endgame.

The deal and every draw come from the seed, which is published when the game ends, so the whole deal can be checked afterwards. Neither player ever sees the other's hand or the order of the stock. This site plays the two-handed game with the French-suited forty; the Italian pack with its cups, coins, swords and batons is the same forty cards under other names, and the four-player partnership game, in which signalling between partners is part of the fun, is a different game and is not played here.

Briscola terms

The stock
The face-down cards left after the deal, with the turned up trump lying crosswise underneath them. Both players draw from it after every trick until it is empty.
Trumps
The suit of the card turned face up at the deal. Any trump beats any card of another suit.
A trick
One card from each player. The higher trump takes it, or the higher card of the suit that was led.
The count
What the cards you have taken are worth. A hundred and twenty points in the pack, and sixty-one wins.

Playing it here

  • Against a person or the bot. The bot needs no account and starts at once. To play a person, be rated and keep your games, you need an account: an email address and a password.
  • At your own pace. Every move has a deadline you both see, from one minute to a week. A game can take an evening or it can take a fortnight.
  • Nothing to buy and nothing to win. No stakes, no prizes, no boosts, no undo. The only thing on offer is a place on a leaderboard, and only if you want one.
  • Every game can be checked. Anything decided by chance comes from the game's seed, and the seed is published the moment the game ends, so any finished game can be replayed and verified by anyone. See fair play.