The Minchiate card game, online, with three friends or the computer

What Minchiate is, and what people call it

Minchiate, also called Germini, is an Italian trick-taking game played with a special 97-card tarot pack. John McLeod's Pagat page, the rules of record for the version we deal, says it was invented in Florence in the 16th century and spread to Rome and much of the south of Italy. Wikipedia lists it as Tarocchi fiorentini, the Florentine tarot, and dates the earliest record of the 97-card game, then called Germini, to 1506. It is no longer widely played. Pagat says the Genoese maker Solesio printed cards for it until around 1930, and that a few enthusiasts in Florence and Britain have tried to revive it since.

Search for the name and you get rules pages, shops and tarot forums. Pagat and Wikipedia explain the game, the shops sell reproduction packs, mostly to collectors, and none of them deals you a hand. This table does, to four people, with the counting done for you. In our opinion a game hardly anyone you know has played is the best kind to meet: nobody has the edge, and a game where everyone starts equal suits friends best. Our aim is every game you can play with a deck or a few decks of cards, which is why a 97-card pack with art of its own is here at all.

The deck: 97 cards, and how it differs from the tarot you read

There are four suits of 14, cups, coins, swords and batons, each with four court cards, king, queen, horse and jack or maid, then ten numerals. In cups and coins the ace, the 1, is the best numeral and the 10 the worst, and in swords and batons it is the other way round. On top come forty trumps, ranked 1 to 40, and the Fool, called the Matto. That is 56, 40 and 1. Pagat calls trumps 16 to 35 the extra numbered trumps added to the standard 78-card tarot: four more virtues (hope, prudence, faith and charity), the four classical elements (fire, water, earth and air), and the twelve signs of the zodiac from Libra to Gemini. The top five, the Trumpets, the World, the Sun, the Moon and the Star, carry no number, so the board writes every trump's number in plain digits and you can read the order without decoding IIII and XXXIIII.

Most of the points sit in the trumps. Of the four suits only the Kings score, 5 each. The 25 counting cards are worth 142 points between them: trumps 36 to 40 are 10 each, trumps 30 to 35 and 28, 20, 13, 10 and 1 are 5 each, trumps 2 to 5 are 3 each, and the Matto is 5.

If you know the Marseilles tarot, here is the cross-walk, from Wikipedia. The card corresponding to the Hermit is the Hunchback, also called Time (11). The Tower is the House of the Devil (15). The Popess, the High Priestess of other packs, is not in the 97. By Wikipedia's table the Empress and the Emperor sit near the bottom as Papa Due and Papa Tre. The last card is not the World, which is 39, but the Trumpets, which Wikipedia lines up with Judgement. It also calls this the only deck with all seven virtues: the three theological virtues, faith, hope and charity, and the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude.

Some of you came for the deck rather than the game. Wikipedia says no divination system for this pack is documented from earlier centuries, and that the ones on offer today are recent proposals. Nothing here reads it or tells a fortune. Some packs carry a 98th card, an unnumbered red trump that probably shows Fortuna, so count yours: ours is Pagat's 97. The pictures are our own original artwork, not a copy of an old printed pack. For a reading with a friend, Tarot for Two is the table, and it uses our own 78-card deck instead.

The rules we follow, and where other tables differ

We deal Pagat's partnership game, the classic one: four people in two fixed partnerships, partners opposite, play counter-clockwise, 21 cards each and 21 tricks. Pagat calls it the principal and most respected form of the game, in and around Florence and Rome from the late 17th to the mid 19th century. None of Pagat's variations is mixed in: no dropping out when you run out of trumps, no doubling for winning every trick, no robbing past 13 cards. There is no game here for two or three people, or for four each playing alone. Wikipedia adds that the rules of the Sicilian and Ligurian versions are lost, and every surviving rule set comes from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Papal States.

Where the sources leave a gap or disagree, we chose. The old books play a set number of deals for stakes and give no target, so a match here is four deals in a room, each seat dealing once, and eight at the computer table. The side with more resti wins, then the side that scored more points, and after that the win is shared. Pagat lets the Matto work in the last trick like any other, while the Italian Wikipedia and Renzoni and Ricci's modern Italian manual say it loses its privilege there and goes to whoever wins the trick. We follow Pagat. Pagat also has the dealer's partner announce how many cards of each suit are in the Fola, the leftover heap. On a screen those counts are public, and only the dealer and the dealer's partner see which cards are in it.

A hand in outline, and one worked example

Before the first card the cutter, the player on the dealer's left, robs. They take cards from the top of the pack while each is a counting card or a trump above 20, 13 at most, and their side scores the counting ones at once. Everyone is dealt 21 cards, the last one turned face up for the table. The cards left over, up to 13, are the Fola. The dealer robs it the same way, then takes out every counting card left in it. Anyone who robbed discards back down to 21, never a counting card and never the 29. Then comes the play, following suit if you can, trumping if you cannot, anything if you have neither. The highest trump takes the trick, or failing that the highest card of the suit led.

Points come from counting cards, from capturing the other side's, and from versicole, sets of trumps that score together. Take Pagat's own example, which our scoring reproduces. You hold the Star, the Moon and the Sun (36, 37, 38), the 32, 33 and 34, and the Matto. Each run of three is a versicola worth the sum of its cards, 30 for the first and 15 for the second. The Matto is not wild, it adds 5 to each versicola, so 45 becomes 55. The table declares it for you on the first trick and shows the cards. A side's won tricks are scored for versicole again at the end.

Everything feeds a running lead. When a side gets 60 points ahead it wins a resto, the stake of the game, and 60 comes off the lead. At the end of the hand the side ahead wins one resto for each 60 points or part of 60. It can hurt to win one early: lead by 65 and take a resto, and if the other side then scores 19 more than you, it finishes 14 ahead and wins one back. One resto each.

What the table does, and what it does not

In a room, the host makes the table and sends each seat its own link, and all four seats have to be taken before the first deal. The host and the guest opposite are one side, the other two guests the other. There are no computer seats in a room and no game for fewer than four. At the computer table you sit in one seat, a computer is your partner opposite and two more sit either side, and the match is eight deals. Pause computers stops them while you think, and each time you open it a different match is dealt.

The board keeps the tally the game is known for. It shows the lead toward 60, the resti won, the counting cards each side has taken and which cards of each suit have gone, and a log of what scored. It groups your hand by suit, then trumps, with the Matto apart, strongest first. A card you cannot play is dimmed, and tapping it says why, for example follow cups, or the suit was trumped and you hold its King. We would learn the rob and the King rule at the computer table before inflicting them on friends.

The computers play by a floor of rules, not a strong game. They discard to make a void, lead low in suits where the seat that plays last may still hold cards, and win a trick with the cheapest card that wins when an opposing counting card is in it or they play last. They hold the Matto while a worthless card will do. They see their own hand and the table, nothing more.

It is a long game: 84 cards played a hand, four hands a match in a room. At the computer table a match is not kept, so shut the tab and it is gone, apart from the high contrast switch, which your device remembers. A room waits 48 hours for the others, and this page lists the tables your browser is still sitting at. No sign-up, no download. Free, and an ad may turn up now and then, which we intend to keep discreet.