Briscola

Briscola is a famous and simple Italian card game. There are many versions and variations, but here you can play with the two players version (1v1 against the computer).

If you already know the rules you can start playing, otherwise continue reading.

Cards

A deck is composed of 40 cards, divided into four suits: coins, swords, cups and bats. The values on the cards range numerically from one through seven, plus three face cards in each suit: Knave, Knight and King. 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.

Below is a table identifying card rank and point values.

Cards (ordered by rank)Points Ace (1)
11 310 King4 Knight3 Knave2 70 60 50 40 20

In total, a deck has 120 points. To win a game, a player must accumulate more points than any other player. If players have the same number of points (60), the game ends in a draw.

Gameplay

Each player starts with three cards. One card is placed face up on the playing surface, and the remaining deck is placed face down. This card is the Briscola, and represents the trump suit for the game.

The first player starts by playing one card face up on the playing surface and then the other player does the same. 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. Then, each player draws a card from the remaining deck, starting with the player who won the trick. 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. 

After all cards have been played, players calculate the total point value of cards in their own piles.

Known issues

On some browsers (e.g. Safari on both iOS and MacOS) the HTML version works only if third party cookies are enabled.