Tarocchi

Before tarot cards were read for fortunes, they were played. In 1500s Italy, tarocchi was a card game for the courts and taverns of Ferrara, Milan and Bologna: a trick-taking game where 22 picture cards beat everything else in the deck.

No complete rulebook survives from that century. The rules below are a playable reconstruction, built from period poems and sermons, the earliest written tarot rules (France, 1637), and Italian tarot games still played today. Where we had to fill a gap, we say so.

What you need

• Three players. Each plays for themselves.
• A 78-card tarot deck. These rules use a standard Rider-Waite deck. You play with all 78 cards: the 56 Minor Arcana in four suits, and the 22 Major Arcana, which are the 21 trumps plus the Fool.
• Pen and paper for scores.
• About 20 minutes per hand.

How the cards rank

Any trump beats any suit card. Among suit cards, only the suit that was led can win.

Trumps are the Major Arcana numbered I to XXI. They rank by their number, from XXI (highest) down to I (lowest). The Fool is numbered 0 in Rider-Waite decks, but it isn’t the lowest trump. It has no rank at all (see The Fool below).

Rider-Waite puts Strength at VIII and Justice at XI. Older decks swap the two, but for play, just follow the numbers on your cards. Renaissance cities disagreed about the order too: in Bologna and Florence, the Angel outranked the World.

Suit cards rank King, Queen, Knight, Page, then the numbered cards. The Page is what Renaissance players called the Jack. The twist is in the numbers:

• Swords and Wands: 10 is high, ace is low, as you’d expect. In the 1500s, Wands were batons.
• Cups and Pentacles: reversed. The ace is the highest numbered card and the 10 is the lowest. In the 1500s, Pentacles were coins.

So in Pentacles, the order from top to bottom is King, Queen, Knight, Page, ace, 2, 3 … 10.

The deal

1. Pick a dealer. The deal passes to the right after each hand, since Italian games run counterclockwise.
2. The dealer shuffles, the player on the left cuts, and the dealer deals 25 cards to each player, in batches of five.
3. Three cards are left over. The dealer adds them to their hand, then discards any three cards face down.
4. The discard can’t include Kings, trumps or the Fool. It counts as the dealer’s first captured cards at scoring.

Playing a hand

The player to the dealer’s right leads the first trick by playing any card. Play continues counterclockwise, one card each. Whoever wins a trick keeps its cards face down in a pile and leads the next one.

1. Follow suit. If you have a card of the suit that was led, you must play one.
2. Otherwise, trump. If you can’t follow suit, you must play a trump.
3. Otherwise, play anything. Only if you have neither can you play any card.
4. If trumps are led, you must play a trump if you have one.

The highest trump in the trick wins it. If no trump was played, the highest card of the led suit wins. You never have to beat the cards already played, only follow the rules above.

The Fool

The Fool is your get-out-of-jail card. You can play it to any trick, at any time, instead of following the rules above.

• It never wins the trick.
• You keep it anyway: put it in your own pile.
• In exchange, give the trick’s winner one plain numbered card from your pile. If your pile is empty, give it as soon as you win a trick.

The Fool is worth points at the end, so it’s a way to protect your valuable cards without losing its own value.

Scoring

You don’t win by taking the most tricks. You win by capturing the valuable cards. The whole deck is worth 78 points, so the average share is 26.

Counting. Each player sorts their pile into groups of three cards, adds up each group’s values, and subtracts 2 from each group. For example, a King with two plain cards is 5 + 1 + 1 − 2 = 5. Three plain cards are 1 + 1 + 1 − 2 = 1.

Settling. Your score for the hand is your points minus 26. Above 26, you’re up; below, you’re down. Keep a running total and play until everyone has dealt the same number of times. The three scores always add up to zero, so you can play for coins if you like.

An example hand

Lucia deals to Bartolo and Cecco. Here are five of the 25 tricks, each showing one rule.

1. Trick 1 Lucia wins

   Bartolo

   7 of Wands leads

   Cecco

   King of Wands

   Lucia

   The Empress (III)

   Lucia has no Wands, so she must trump. A low trump captures a King worth 5.

2. Trick 2 Cecco wins

   Bartolo

   9 of Pentacles

   Cecco

   Queen of Pentacles

   Lucia

   2 of Pentacles leads

   Court cards beat numbers. In Pentacles the 2 is strong and the 9 weak.

3. Trick 3 Lucia wins

   Bartolo

   The Fool

   Cecco

   The Moon (XVIII) leads

   Lucia

   Judgement (XX)

   Bartolo plays the Fool to save his Magician. He keeps the Fool and gives Lucia a plain card.

4. Trick 4 Lucia wins

   Bartolo

   The Hanged Man (XII)

   Cecco

   The Hierophant (V)

   Lucia

   The World leads

   The World can’t lose. Leading it forces everyone to give up a trump.

5. Trick 5 Lucia wins

   Bartolo

   The Magician

   Cecco

   The Hermit (IX)

   Lucia

   The Tower (XVI) leads

   Bartolo’s last trump is the Magician, and he must play it. Lucia captures 5 more points.

After five tricks, Lucia’s pile holds three cards worth 5 each: Cecco’s King, Bartolo’s Magician and her own World. Bartolo has only the Fool. The Magician is the hardest card to keep, and Bartolo learned it the hard way.

Strategy tips

• Empty a suit early. Once you’re out of a suit, you can trump other players’ Kings with your lowest trumps.
• Guard the Magician. It’s worth 5 but loses to every other trump. Hold enough trumps to protect it, or save the Fool for the moment it’s under attack.
• Lead high trumps to hunt. The World can’t lose. Leading it drains trumps from the table, which can force out a hidden Magician.
• Don’t throw points away. When you can’t win a trick, play a plain card, not a court card.

Where these rules come from

The core of the game is well attested: trumps beating suits, the obligation to follow suit or trump, the Fool as an excuse, reversed cups and coins, and scoring by captured cards. The details are reconstructed:

• The 25-card deal and dealer’s discard come from the earliest written tarot rules, recorded in France in 1637 by the Abbé Michel de Marolles.
• The card values and counting in threes come from later French and Italian tarot games, which almost certainly kept the older system.
• The trump order follows Rider-Waite numbering. Sixteenth-century cards usually had no numbers, and each city ranked the top trumps its own way.

Period sources that mention or describe the game include a Ferrarese sermon listing the trumps (c. 1500), Francesco Berni’s poem on primiera (1526), Pietro Aretino’s dialogue Le carte parlanti (1543), and Flavio Alberto Lollio’s mock-attack Invettiva contra il giuoco del Taroco (1550).

Further reading: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980), the standard history of tarot as a game. To play a living descendant, look up Bolognese Tarocchino or Sicilian Tarocchi.