How to play Madrasso
The rules of Madrasso, and a game played out one move at a time.
The rules of this Venetian card game are below, and they take a couple of minutes. To watch instead, press play: we deal one hand of ten tricks on the real table and stop on every move to say what happened and which rule it was. You will see the seven swapped, a seat trumping and the last trick’s bonus.
Press play and we deal a short game of Madrasso on the real table. It stops on every move and says what just happened and what you could do next.
Four players, two teams
Madrasso takes exactly four players, two against two. You are partners with the person sitting across from you, and your team is up against the two on your left and right. The pack is forty cards: an ordinary deck with the eights, nines and tens taken out, so each suit runs ace, three, king, queen, jack, seven, six, five, four, two. The Italian names are asso, tre, re, cavallo and fante, and here the queen takes the place of the cavallo, the horse, and the jack the place of the fante.
The ranking, and what the cards are worth
The ranking of the cards and their points run in the same order. The ace is eleven, the three ten, the king four, the queen three, the jack two. Seven down to two are worth nothing. That makes thirty points in every suit and a hundred and twenty in the pack.
The last trick is worth a ten-point bonus, so a hand always adds up to 130 between the two teams. The aces and threes are called carichi, the picture cards punti, and the empty pips scartine.
The deal and the trump card
Ten cards each, dealt one at a time round the table, starting with the seat after the dealer. The dealer’s tenth and last card is turned face up, and its suit is trump. That card is still the dealer’s. It is one of their ten, and they can play it any time. The board shows it to everybody. The first dealer is picked at random, and the job moves one seat on after every hand.
The player after the dealer leads the first trick. Whoever wins a trick leads the next, and ten tricks finish the hand.
The seven of trumps
If you hold the seven of the trump suit, you may swap it for the turned-up card, but only on the first trick, on your own turn and before you play, and only when the turned-up card is an ace, three, king, queen or jack. If you lead, you can do it before you lead.
The swap is announced to the table. The seven goes face up in the dealer’s hand as the new turned-up card, and you take the card that was there. The swap is offered on your screen only when you can make it, and the dealer cannot swap with their own card. A seven nobody swaps is just a low trump.
Playing a trick
The leader plays any card. Everybody else, in turn, must follow the suit led if they can. That is the only obligation: you never have to beat the cards already down. With none of the suit, you may play anything, a trump or a card you want to discard.
The highest trump in the trick wins it. If nobody trumped, the highest card of the suit led wins, and a card of another suit never does. If a trump is led, everybody follows with trumps if they have them.
Try it. Hearts are trump and the king of clubs leads. The next seat plays the seven of clubs, the third has no clubs and trumps with the five of hearts, and the fourth has only the ace of clubs, so that seat has to play it. The five of hearts wins. Fifteen points go to the third seat’s team: four, nothing, nothing and eleven.
Scoring a deal, and how a match is won
When the tenth trick is done, each team counts the points in the tricks it won, and the team taking the last trick adds its ten. The two counts make 130, and they go onto your totals.
Nobody can win on points before ten deals have been played. After the tenth, a team with 777 or more wins. If neither has it, play on. From the eleventh deal a team wins the moment a trick lifts its running total to 777. In pagat’s rules you declare it yourself, si chiama fuori, saying you are out. Here the table calls it for you. A match cannot run past twelve deals.
The other way to end it is a cappotto: take all ten tricks in one deal and the whole match is yours at once. Taking all 130 points is not a cappotto. If the other team wins even one trick of four worthless cards, there is none.
Which rules we use
We follow the pagat.com description of the Venetian game. Where sources disagree, we let a seat with no card of the suit play anything, as pagat does, rather than force a trump. The Venetian game allows no signals and no talking during a hand. The table does not enforce that, since chat and voice are why you have a table at all, but it is a good manner if you want the real thing.
Briscola and Scopa are not the same game. Briscola is a trick-taking game with a trump and no duty to follow suit, and its card values are the ones Madrasso keeps. Scopa is another kind of game, where you capture cards from the table by matching them. Tressette is the one with the duty to follow suit. Pagat lists all three among the best known Italian card games and calls Madrasso perhaps the most popular card game in Venice, and Madrasso mixes the first two.
A few habits worth having
Count what has gone. There is no bidding and no dummy, so the tricks in your head are your only source. Pagat’s advice with a strong hand, aces, threes and several trumps, is to draw trumps at once, ace first. With a weak, evenly spread hand it says to lead a singleton, even a picture card, so you are void next time round and can trump. Venetians call that leading alla furlana. Watch the last trick, too: it is worth ten.
Press play above, or take three friends to a table. It is free.