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Briscola
Cards · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Forty cards, three in your hand, one trump suit, and one hundred and twenty points in the pack. Take sixty-one and you have won. The rules fit in a paragraph, which is exactly why Italians have been arguing about the right play for three hundred years.
Where it comes from
Briscola is an ace-ten game: a family in which the ace and the three outrank and outscore the picture cards, which strikes everyone raised on English card games as backwards the first time they meet it.
The line of descent most scholars accept runs back to Brusquembille, a French game whose rules were printed in 1718 — the earliest surviving French rules for an ace-ten game, and the ancestor of briscan and bezique as well. The name itself seems to come the same way, from the French brisque; in Italian it became briscola, which simply means trump. When exactly it crossed the Alps is genuinely disputed: some accounts put it in the sixteenth century with French soldiers and Dutch sailors, others as late as the early eighteenth in Friuli. The honest answer is that nobody knows.
What is certain is what happened afterwards. Briscola became one of the games every Italian household can deal, played with the regional forty-card decks — Napoletane, Piacentine, Bergamasche, Trevigiane, Siciliane — which have the same forty cards in different clothes. And it grew the variant that made it a social event rather than a pastime: briscola chiamata, for five players, where the trump is bid for and the caller’s partner is the player holding one named card and does not say so. For several tricks nobody at the table is sure who is on their side.
The card values
Only six of the forty cards are worth anything. The other four in each suit — the two, the four, the five and the six — are called scartini and are worth exactly nothing, which makes them useful for throwing away.
| Ace (Asso) | 11 points |
|---|---|
| Three (Tre) | 10 points |
| King (Re) | 4 points |
| Knight (Cavallo) | 3 points |
| Jack (Fante) | 2 points |
| 7, 6, 5, 4, 2 | nothing |
Eleven and ten for the ace and the three is the figure to remember: twenty-one of the hundred and twenty points in the pack are sitting in any one suit’s two top cards. A single trick can be a sixth of the game.
How to play
Three cards each. One card is turned face up under the remaining stock: that suit is trump for the whole hand, and that card is the last one anybody draws. Leader plays anything; you do not have to follow suit, which is the rule that surprises every new player and is the source of most of the tactics. Highest trump takes the trick, or, with no trump in it, the highest card of the suit led. Winner draws first, then the other, and leads the next trick. Sixty-one points wins; sixty each is a draw.
Three things that help
Do not spend a trump to win nothing. If the trick on the table holds two scartini, let it go and throw a worthless card into it. Trumps are for taking aces and threes.
Lead small, early. While the stock is deep, leading a four or a five costs almost nothing and makes your opponent decide first.
Count the trumps. There are ten. Keeping a rough count of how many have gone is the whole difference between a decent player and a good one, and it is a count small enough to hold in your head.