Briscola
Also known as Briscula, Briškula
- Players
- 2-6 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck stripped to 40 cards (A, K, Q, J, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 in each suit)
- Time
- 15-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Trick-taking
Setup
Briscola runs on forty cards. An Italian pack of coins, cups, swords and batons is ready to go as it comes; with an ordinary pack, discard the jokers and every eight, nine and ten, and you are left with exactly the same game in familiar pips. The Italian court of king, horse and jack maps onto king, queen and jack, which is the northern convention and the one most books print; many players in the south swap the last two over, making the jack the three-point card and the queen the two-point one. Settle which before you deal, because it is worth a point either way.
Deal and play both run counter-clockwise, so cards go out to the dealer's right and the deal itself moves right after every hand. Settle the first dealer any way you like; nothing in the game turns on it. Four players is the classic form, partners facing each other across the table; two is the form everyone learns on.
Give three cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the player on the dealer's right. What comes off the pack next is a single card, played face up on the table; the undealt remainder then goes down on top of it at an angle, squared enough to serve as a stock but leaving an edge of that one card on show all deal long. Its suit is the briscola, trump for the whole hand, and since everything else has been stacked over it, it is also the card that will be drawn last of all.
What has to be learned before the first trick is that the ranking follows the money rather than the pips. Only aces, threes and the three court cards carry any value at all, the pack holds 120 points between them, and 84 of those points sit in the four aces and the four threes alone. Those eight cards decide most hands, which is why they also sit at the top of the order.
Each side keeps its won tricks in a face-down pile and leaves them alone until the deal is over. Nobody counts aloud during play.
| Players | Each player gets | Removed from the deck | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 3 cards | — | Thirty-four cards left over, one of them the turned trump; twenty tricks in the deal. |
| 3 | 3 cards | any one 2 | Thirty-nine cards, no partnerships, highest total wins. |
| 4 | 3 cards | — | Two partnerships, partners facing; ten tricks in the deal. |
| 5 | 8 cards | — | The whole pack is dealt and there is no stock: this is Briscola Chiamata, a different game. |
| 6 | 3 cards | all four 2s | Thirty-six cards, two partnerships of three, only six tricks in the deal. |
Play
The player on the dealer's right leads to the first trick, and thereafter whoever won the last trick leads to the next.
Then comes the rule that makes Briscola what it is: there is no obligation to follow suit, ever. Whatever is led, you may answer with any card in your hand. Nobody is ever squeezed into throwing away a good card, so every trick is a free choice between spending a counter and hoarding it.
A trick is won by the highest trump played to it. With no trump in it, the trick falls to whoever played highest in whatever suit was led, and cards of the two or three suits that are neither trump nor the led suit cannot win it no matter how high they rank — a discarded ace off-suit takes nothing and gives away eleven points to whoever does win. The winner turns the trick face down onto their pile.
Drawing keeps hands at three. A completed trick is followed by a round of replenishment, one card to everybody: it opens with whoever took the trick and travels counter-clockwise from there. Every player count that uses a stock divides the remainder evenly, so no round of drawing runs dry partway through and nobody is left a card short. It is that final round which strips the pile down to the exposed trump, so the trump card falls to whoever sits last in the drawing order — with two players, the one who has just lost the trick. From then on nothing is replaced, so every deal ends with three drawless tricks in which the whole remaining pack is, in principle, knowable. Counting what has already gone is where the game stops being luck.
The hand ends when everybody has run out of cards.
Partnerships. Most tables let partners help each other along in one of two ways, and the first trick is played in silence under either. One way is an agreed set of facial signals — segni — flashed when the opponents are not looking, each standing for one high trump: lips stretched over the teeth for the ace, the mouth pulled to one side for the three, a glance upward for the king, the tip of the tongue for the horse, a shrugged shoulder for the jack. The other, reported around Rome, is a limited vocabulary of questions and orders belonging to whoever leads the trick: you may ask a partner whether they hold low trumps, whether they hold high ones, whether they hold an ace or three outside trumps, or whether they can take the trick without trumping, and you may instruct them to do any of those things. What you may not ask about is the ace or the three of trumps themselves. Some groups allow neither, so decide before the first deal which kind of table you are at.
At five players the arithmetic stops working and the game turns into a different one, in which the whole pack is dealt out, there is no stock, and the trump suit is settled by auction.
Goal & scoring
The object is to capture point cards in tricks. When the last trick is over, each side gathers everything it won and adds up the values, and the totals must come to 120 between them — if they do not, a card has gone astray and the count has to be done again. That figure holds at three and six players as well, because the twos pulled out to make the pack divide are worth nothing.
Sixty-one takes the deal. There is no bonus for taking more, and the winner of a deal wins it exactly as much with 61 as with 120. A dead-level 60 apiece is a draw and neither side gets anything for it.
One deal is a short game, so tables usually play a match: best of three deals, or best of five, with a drawn deal counted to nobody and replayed. Some groups instead keep a running tally of deals won and stop at an agreed figure. At three players, where there are no partnerships, the highest of the three totals takes the deal — 61 is not needed and often not reached, since the same 120 is split three ways. One published scheme scores the three-handed game differently again, awarding a game point to each player who passes 40, two if only one player manages it, and three for taking all 120.
Because at two, four and six players 61 is the only threshold, the endgame is not about squeezing out extra points but about knowing when you are already safe. Once your pile is past 60 you can afford to throw the rest away, and a good player who is behind will hold aces back rather than spend them on tricks that do not close the gap.
| Scores | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Each ace | 11 | — |
| Each three | 10 | — |
| Each king | 4 | — |
| Each queen (horse) | 3 | southern Italian tables swap the queen and jack values |
| Each jack | 2 | — |
| Seven, six, five, four, two | 0 | twenty worthless cards, called scartini; the three is not one of them |
| Whole pack | 120 | 61 wins the deal, 60 apiece is a draw |
Variants
Briscola Chiamata — The five-handed game, also met as Briscola Bastarda, Briscola Assassina or Briscolone. All forty cards are dealt out, eight each, with no stock and no turned trump. The auction is for the right to call a partner, and it runs downwards: bidders name a rank only and never a suit, each bid must be lower than the last, and the auction goes to whoever will settle for the weakest partner. The winner then names the trump suit, and whoever holds the called card in that suit is their partner — silently, so for the first few tricks nobody is sure who they are helping. Bidding as far down as the two turns the auction into a points auction instead, each bid promising more than the last. The caller's side must take 61 card points, or whatever higher figure was bid; the other three win by holding them to 60. A caller who names a card in their own hand plays alone against four, and wins or loses double for it.
Briscola Scoperta — Open Briscola. Every hand is dealt face up and the stock is turned so that the next card to be drawn is visible too. All the hidden information disappears and the game becomes a pure calculation exercise, which makes it excellent for teaching a beginner what the discards are actually costing them.
Briscolone — A two-handed version with five-card hands instead of three and no trump suit at all, so a trick always goes to the higher card of the suit led. Losing the trump removes the game's escape hatch: an ace led is safe, and there is no way to steal a fat trick with a low card of a favoured suit. One deal does not settle it — play runs on to a cumulative 121 or 151 card points — and it is commonly played with an obligation the parent game never imposes, that you must follow suit when you can. A three-card version of the same idea goes further and makes you head the trick as well, for the three tricks after the stock has gone. Confusingly the name is also used in places for the five-handed calling game.
Brisca (Spain) — Brisca is the same game in Spain and runs the same way, including the freedom to throw whatever you like: heading the trick is no more obligatory there than it is in Italy. Two rules of its own are worth knowing. The exposed trump card can be bought — a player who has won at least one trick and holds the seven of trumps may swap it for the turned card if that card is higher than a seven, or the two if it is a seven or lower, at any time before the last draw. And a player holding the ace of trumps may play it and declare arrastro, which obliges everyone still to play to that trick to put down the best card they hold, trump suit first. Argentina's brisca porteña drops the free play altogether and requires following, trumping and overtrumping throughout, which makes it a noticeably different game from the one described above.
No signals at all — Some groups play the partnership game with no communication of any kind: no signs, no questions, no comment on the trick in progress, and the only information crossing the table is which cards get played and when. Chile's brisca is played this way as a matter of course. Groups used to signalling find the partnership game much harder without them, since a lead has to carry the whole message on its own.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Board Game Arena, Denexa Games, Gambiter, Official Game Rules.