How to Play Briscola

Briscola is Italy's everyday card game. It is played over coffee, after Sunday dinner and in the back room of every bar from the Alps to Sicily, and it came to America with a great many families. It is a trick game, but a gentle one: there is no bidding, no need to follow suit, and only three cards in your hand at a time. What you are after is not tricks but points, and the points live in a handful of cards.

These are the rules our free online Briscola game uses for two players. Where families play differently, we say so, and the rule variations page covers the house rules and the four-player game.

The Deck

Briscola uses a 40-card Italian deck: four suits of ten cards each, with no 8s, 9s or 10s. Italian cards have their own suits and their own pictures, and the designs change from region to region. You don't need them. Take an ordinary deck, remove the twelve 8s, 9s and 10s, and you have exactly the right cards. That is how our game is drawn, with the site's big, easy-to-read cards.

If you learned the game with Italian cards, here is how they match up:

The suits have no order of their own. Only the trump suit is special, and that changes every hand.

Card Order and Points

This is the one part of Briscola that surprises newcomers. In every suit, from strongest to weakest, the cards go:

Ace, 3, King, Queen, Jack, 7, 6, 5, 4, 2

The three sits just below the ace and above the king. Five of the ten cards in each suit carry points; the other five are worth nothing and are called lisci ("smooth" cards; one is a liscio).

Notice that the aces and threes hold 84 of the 120 points. Most hands are decided by who ends up with them. Our game puts a small badge with the points on every card, so you can learn the values as you play.

The Deal

Shuffle the 40 cards. The dealer gives three cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the opponent. Then the dealer turns the next card face up and lays it crosswise under the rest of the deck, so that it sticks out and both players can see it. The face-down pile on top of it is the stock.

The suit of the face-up card is trump for the whole hand. In Italian, both the trump suit and that card are called the briscola, which is where the game gets its name. If the face-up card is the 5 of hearts, hearts are trump.

The player who did not deal leads the first trick. The deal alternates from hand to hand. In our game the computer deals the first hand, so you lead first.

Playing a Trick

The leader plays any card face up. The other player then plays any card they like. There is no obligation to follow suit and no obligation to win the trick. You may answer a spade with a spade, a heart or a club: whatever suits your plan.

The trick is won like this:

• If one or both cards are trumps, the highest trump wins.
• If there is no trump, the higher card of the suit led wins.
• A card of a different suit that is not trump can never win, however high it is.

The winner puts both cards face down in their own pile. Those cards are what they will count at the end.

Examples

• Hearts are trump. You lead the king of clubs; the computer plays the ace of clubs. Same suit, the ace is higher: the computer wins 4 + 11 = 15 points.
• Hearts are trump. You lead the 3 of spades; the computer plays the 4 of hearts. The 4 is a trump: the computer wins 10 points with one of its smallest cards.
• Hearts are trump. You lead the 2 of diamonds; the computer plays the ace of clubs. Clubs were not led and are not trump, so your 2 wins, and you collect the computer's 11 points.
• Hearts are trump. The computer leads the 7 of hearts; you play the 3 of hearts. Both are trumps and the 3 is higher: you win 10 points.

The third example shows why you must be careful. Throwing a valuable card onto a trick you can't win simply hands its points to your opponent.

Drawing from the Stock

After each trick, while the stock lasts, both players draw one card so that each holds three again. The winner of the trick draws first, taking the top card of the stock, and the other player takes the next. The winner then leads the next trick.

The stock has 33 face-down cards, and the face-up trump card is the 34th. After 16 tricks, one face-down card remains. After the 17th trick, the winner takes that last face-down card and the loser takes the face-up trump card. Everyone has seen which card that is, so both players know who holds it. Losing the 17th trick on purpose to collect a good face-up trump is a well-known trick of experienced players.

The Last Three Tricks

When the stock is gone, each player still has three cards. Play them out the same way, with no more drawing. A careful player can now work out exactly which cards the opponent holds: they are the cards not yet seen. This is where good counting pays off.

Scoring a Hand

After all 20 tricks, each player counts the points in the cards they won. The two totals always add up to 120.

• 61 points or more wins the hand.
• 60 points each is a draw.

A win is a win: 61 points counts the same as 100. That is why a hand can stay tense to the very last trick, when one ace or three can swing it either way.

Worked Example

At the end of a hand you have won these point cards: the ace and 3 of spades, the ace of hearts, the king and queen of clubs, two jacks and the 3 of diamonds. Add them up: 11 + 10 + 11 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 10 = 53 points. All your other cards are lisci. The computer must have the other 120 − 53 = 67 points, so the computer wins the hand.

In real life you would count your pile at the end. In our game the running totals are always on screen ("You 47 · Computer 38 · 35 left in play"), so you always know how close the hand is.

Winning the Match

A single hand of Briscola takes only a few minutes, so players usually play a short match. Our standard match is the best of three: the first to win two hands wins. A drawn hand counts for nobody. In Settings you can choose a single hand, the best of five, or first to win five hands instead.

Quick Reference

Now you know the rules, our Briscola strategy guide explains when to trump, what to lead and how to count the cards. If you like trick games where trump comes from the deck, try Whist as well.