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Scopa
Cards · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Match a card on the table, or take several that add up to the one you played. Clear the table completely and you have made a scopa — a sweep — and that is a point on its own. Nobody ever explains the rest of the scoring properly, so it is written out here.
Where it comes from
Scopa belongs to the fishing family: games where cards lie face up on the table and you catch them with the card in your hand. The family is old and widespread — the Chinese have one, so do the Spanish — but scopa itself is Italian, and the trail goes cold earlier than anybody would like.
What can be said is that it was already played everywhere in Italy by the eighteenth century, and that Naples is where its popularity peaked. Accounts that push it further back — to Spanish games in the port of fifteenth-century Naples, or to sailors and pirates bringing it ashore in the late seventeen-hundreds — contradict each other and rest on very little. The game was carried out of Italy by emigrants, which is why it is played in Argentina and Brazil.
The deck is the Italian forty: ace to seven, then knave, knight and king, in four suits that change their clothes from region to region — cups, coins, swords and clubs under Neapolitan or Piacentine or Sicilian pictures. And one card out of the forty has a name of its own: the settebello, the seven of coins, which is worth a point at the end all by itself and has become a general Italian expression for a piece of luck.
How to play
| The deal | Three cards each, four face up on the table. |
|---|---|
| Capturing | Play a card and take the table card of the same value — or several that add up to it. |
| One match only | If an exact single card matches, you must take that one; you cannot take a sum instead. |
| No capture | Your card stays on the table. |
| Scopa | Clear the table completely: one point, immediately. |
| The last trick | Whoever captured last takes whatever is left on the table. |
Card values for capturing are face value, then knave 8, knight 9, king 10.
The four points at the end
The hand is scored on four things, one point each, plus a point for every sweep:
- Carte — most cards captured.
- Denari — most coins.
- Settebello — whoever took the seven of coins.
- Primiera — the best set of four cards, one per suit, counted on a scale of its own in which the sevens are worth most and the kings least.
The primiera is the part everybody gets wrong, and it is the reason sevens are valuable beyond their face: a seven in each suit is as good as the count can get.
Three things that help
Chase the coins, not the cards. Two of the four points depend on the suit of coins. A trick that takes four worthless cards and no coin has won you very little.
Count to ten. When the cards on the table add up to ten or less with a card you hold, your opponent is one move from a sweep. Leaving the table in that state is how sweeps are given away.
Remember the sevens. There are four, and all four matter twice over — once for the settebello and once for the primiera. They are the only cards worth keeping count of.