Briscola - card game

We have reported in the past the card playing games taking place in Barga during the evenings (article here). That game was Buracco, but there is another card game that is played by many people in this area - the game of Briscola. This evening there was a briscola competition organised at La Mocchia - the osteria just outside Barga (site here) Briscola is an Italian trick-taking card game for two to six players, played with a standard Italian 40-card deck.

Twenty players sat down across the tables to fight it out for a series of prizes and the chance to go on to the next level.

The four- and six-player versions of the game are played as a partnership game of two teams, with players seated such that every player is adjacent to two opponents.

A deck of Italian cards consist of 40 cards, divided into four suits: Coins, Cups, Swords, and Clubs (or batons). The values on the cards range numerically from one through seven, plus three face cards in each suit: Knave [Fante in Italian], Knight [Cavallo in Italian], and King [Re in Italian]. A Knave is a lone human figure standing. The Knight is a human figure riding a horse. The King is a human figure wearing a crown. To determine the face value of any numeric card, simply count the number of suit icons on the card. The ace card of coins is usually a type of bird with circle in the middle. Below is a table identifying card rank and point values. Unlisted cards have no point value, and are ranked in descending ordinal value, from seven to two. Game play After the deck is shuffled, each player is dealt three cards. The next card is placed face up on the playing surface, and the remaining deck is placed face down, sometimes covering half of the up-turned card. This card is the Briscola, and represents the trump suit for the game. The deal, and game play itself, proceeds counter-clockwise. The player to the right of the dealer leads the first hand (or trick) by playing one card face up on the playing surface. Each player subsequently plays a card in turn, until all players have played one card. The winner of that hand is determined as follows: * if any briscola (trump) has been played, the player who played the highest valued trump wins * if no briscole (trumps) have been played, the player who played the highest card of the lead suit wins Unlike other trump card games, players are not required to follow suit, that is, to play the same suit as the lead player. Once the winner of a trick is determined, that player collects the played cards, and places them face down in a pile. Each player maintains his/her own pile, though the four- and six-player versions may have one player collecting all tricks won by his partners. Then, each player draws a card from the remaining deck, starting with the player who won the trick, proceeding counter-clockwise. Note that the last card collected in the game should be the up-turned Briscola. The player who won the trick leads the next hand. Before the last hand, people in the same team can look at each other’s cards. After all cards have been played, players calculate the total point value of cards in their own piles. For multi-player games, partners combine their points.

From the game of briscola comes the Italian idiomatic sentence contare come il due di briscola (to count as much as the two of briscola), meaning that one has no power amongst a group and that one’s words are taken into no account, since the two is the lowest card in the deck. In briscola, the one and three are called “carichi” (Italian for loads) and to take a trick with a carico is called “ammazzare” or “strozzare” (Italian for “to kill” and “to throttle”, respectively). source - Wikipedia

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