How to play Minchiate

The Minchiate pack, and which card beats which

Minchiate is the Florentine tarot game, played with 97 playing cards: four suits of 14, forty trumps, and the Fool, called the Matto. Like other tarot games it is played in tricks, and the trumps are the strong cards. Cups and coins are the round suits, swords and batons the long ones. Each suit runs king, queen, horse, then a maid in the round suits or a jack in the long ones, then ten numerals. The numerals run opposite ways. In cups and coins the 1 is the best numeral and the 10 the worst. In swords and batons the 10 is the best and the 1 the worst.

The correct order of the trumps is simply their number: 1 is lowest and 40 highest, and any trump beats any card of a plain suit. Cards of two different plain suits are never compared, only the suit led and the trumps. The five highest, the Trumpets (40), the World (39), the Sun (38), the Moon (37) and the Star (36), have no number printed on them. The other 35 carry Roman numerals in the old forms, IIII for 4 and XXIIII for 24.

What do the trumps show? Wikipedia's list runs from the bottom. The five Papi, the popes of the old lists, are Papa Uno (1), Papa Due (2, the Empress), Papa Tre (3, the Emperor), Papa Quattro (4, called the Pope in printed packs, where this pack draws a second emperor) and Papa Cinque (5, Love). Then come Temperance, Fortitude and Justice (6 to 8), the Wheel of Fortune (9), the Chariot (10), the Hunchback or Time (11), the Traitor (12, a hanged man in printed packs and a kneeling courtier in this one), Death (13), the Devil (14) and the House of the Devil (15). The added trumps are 16 to 19, the four virtues hope, prudence, faith and charity, then 20 to 23, the four elements fire, water, earth and air, and 24 to 35, the twelve signs of the zodiac: Libra, Virgo, Scorpio, Aries, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Cancer, Pisces, Aquarius, Leo, Taurus and Gemini. Their Italian names are La Bilancia (24), La Vergine, Lo Scorpione, L'Ariete, Il Capricorno, Il Sagittario, Il Cancro, I Pesci, L'Acquario, Il Leone (33), Il Toro and I Gemelli (35). On top are the five Arie, from the Star to the Trumpets, and Wikipedia lines the Trumpets up with the Judgement card of other tarot packs.

The Matto has no rank. It never wins a trick, it is not a trump, and it is worth 5 points.

Minchiate roles: four people, two partnerships

Four people sit as two partnerships, partners opposite. Play runs counter-clockwise, so the next player to act sits at your right. The dealer and the dealer's partner are one side, and the dealer's two opponents are the other. One opponent is the leader, the player at the dealer's right, who plays first to the first trick. The other is the cutter, the player at the dealer's left, who robs first. Each seat does something different before the first card. The aim, says Pagat, is to save your own counting cards, help save your partner's and capture the opponents', above all the ones that form versicole.

Before the first card: the rob, the Fola and the discards

The dealer and the cutter may each get extra cards before play, then trim back to 21. Pagat says the elaborate dealing has two purposes: to put all the important cards in the hands, and to give a little information about where some cards are.

A counting card is one with points, and the full list is below. Two kinds of card can be robbed: a counting card, or any trump above 20. The cutter goes first. They take cards from the top of the pack one at a time while each one can be robbed, 13 at most, and stop at the first that cannot, which stays where it is. Their side scores each counting card they took, straight away.

Then everyone is dealt 21 cards, and the last card of each hand goes face up for the whole table. If it is a counting card, its owner's side scores it. What is left, up to 13 cards, is the Fola. The dealer robs it from the top the same way and their side scores what they take. Then the dealer takes out every counting card still in it, and the 29, with no score for those. Everyone sees how many cards of each plain suit the Fola now holds, and only the dealer and the dealer's partner see the cards themselves.

Whoever robbed now holds more than 21, so they discard face down back to 21: the dealer as many as they robbed and took out, the cutter as many as they robbed. A counting card and the 29 cannot be discarded. Everyone knows how many were discarded, and the cards themselves are shown once the first card has been led.

How a Minchiate trick is played

This is the tarot way of playing in tricks, with two twists of its own. The leader plays any card except the Matto. Each other player must follow the suit led if they can. With none of it, you must play a trump, and with no trump either you may play anything. If a trump is led, follow with a trump if you have one. Nothing forces you to beat the card on the table or to overtrump. The highest trump wins the trick, or, if nobody trumped, the highest card of the suit led, and the winner leads next.

The King rule catches people out. The first time a plain suit is led in a hand, if one player trumps it and a later player holds the King of that suit, that player must play the King. It does not apply to a suit that has been led before, or when nobody has trumped yet, and the Matto cannot be used to dodge it.

The Matto can be played to any trick instead of following suit or trumping. It never wins, and it stays with the side of whoever played it. If the other side wins that trick, your side owes them one card from its own pile at the end, a worthless one if there is any. If your side won no trick at all, the Matto itself goes across, and they score its 5. You can lead the Matto only as your very last card, which leaves you no choice by then, and the next player's card sets the suit. Pagat leaves a led Matto open and suggests exactly that. It keeps its power in the last trick as well. Some Italian sources say it loses it there, and we follow Pagat.

Minchiate scoring: what counts

Counting cards are worth 142 points between 25 of 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. The four Kings and the Matto are 5 each. The 29 is worth nothing alone, but 5 inside a versicola. Every other card is worth nothing.

Capturing counts. If a counting card played by one side lands in a trick the other side wins, the winners score its value at once, and the card is said to die. Say you lead the King of cups and the other side trumps it: the King dies and they score 5. If it is your partner's King and you win the trick, nobody scores for it. The Matto is the exception, since the exchange above handles it.

Then there are versicole, sets of trumps that score together, each worth the sum of its cards. A regular one is three or more consecutive trumps in 1 to 5 or in 28 to 40. There are four irregular ones. The Matto with the 1 and the 40 is worth 20. The 1, 13 and 28 are worth 15. The tens are 10, 20 and 30 for 15, or 20, 30 and 40 for 20, or all four for 25. Three Kings are worth 15 and four are worth 20. Holding the Matto adds 5 to each of these except its own, and runs that touch merge into one.

Take the 36, 37 and 38 with the 32, 33 and 34, and the Matto. The first run is worth 30 and the second 15, which is 45, and the Matto adds 5 to each of the two versicole, which makes 55. Add the 35 and the two runs merge into one from 32 to 38, worth 50, and the Matto adds 5 once. That is 55 again.

You declare your own versicole on the first trick, from your own 21 cards only, since partners do not combine at that stage. At the end of the hand each side is scored for the versicole in the tricks it won as well. Also at the end: 10 points for the last trick, the value of the counting cards in your pile, and one point for each card over 42. Win 13 tricks to 8 and your 52 cards are worth 10 points, and 12 tricks to 9 is worth 6.

Resti, and how a Minchiate match is won

Points are kept as a running lead between the sides. When a side is 60 or more 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, and the lead goes back to zero. Winning one in the middle of a hand can be a mistake. A side leads by 65 and wins a resto, which leaves it 5 ahead. If the other side then scores 19 more than it does, that side finishes 14 ahead and wins a resto too, so it is one each.

Pagat's version has a set number of deals for stakes rather than a target. So a match here is four deals in a room, eight against the computer, the dealer moving on one seat each deal. After the last, more resti wins, then more points scored, and after that it is shared.

What to watch for on your first hands, from Pagat

Some cards are jealous ones, in Pagat's phrase. The 1 belongs to three different versicole, the 3 makes the Papi run possible, the 20 and the 30 make the tens, and the Sun, 38, sits in every run of three among the top five. Do not play one into a trick you cannot be sure of. If you hold a King and fear an opponent is void in its suit, lead a low card of that suit early, which Pagat calls hanging the King, so the King rule cannot pull it out under a trump. The computers at our table take the same care with those jealous cards: they will not win with one unless the trick is safe.

A short history of the game

Minchiate, known in its early days as Germini, is a 16th-century card game from Florence, played with an expanded tarot pack. Wikipedia dates the earliest record of the 97-card game, then Germini, to 1506, and says Germini takes its name from Gemini, the twins on trump 35. The older story of the name Minchiate ties it to sminchiare, to play a high trump, which is a key feature of the game. In its classic form it is the four-person partnership game we deal. Pagat says that form was the principal and most respected version from the late 17th to the mid 19th century, and that packs were printed in Genoa until around 1930.

How this table runs it, and the hand on this page

The table does the bookkeeping. Numerals in cups and coins are red and those in swords and batons black, each with a letter, and a legend says which way each runs. Every trump carries its number in plain digits, the five unnumbered ones included, and the dealer is marked. Versicole are declared for you on the first trick, with the cards shown, and when your side owes a card for the Matto it picks the one that leaves you best off. A card you may not play is dimmed, and tapping it says why: follow cups, no cups so play a trump, the suit was trumped and you hold its King, or the Matto only as your last card. The discards work the same way, with the cards you may not choose dimmed and the reason given.

The hand on this page is one whole deal replayed through the same rules a room uses, so it cannot show a move the table would refuse. It goes through the cutter's rob and the cards shown face up, the dealer's rob and the Fola, the discards, a versicola declared, a suit trumped and the King rule, a death, the Matto's exchange, the last trick, and the count and the resti at the end. Press play and it stops at each stage to say what scored.

In a room all four seats are people, and chat is always on. Voice is on only if the host chose it when making the table. At the computer table you have a computer partner, and Pause computers holds them while you think.

If you came for the Minchiate deck, not the game

A lot of people who search for Minchiate want the pack, or a reading with it. This page is about the game. It will not tell you what a card means for your life, and Wikipedia says no divination system for the pack is documented from earlier centuries. What it does have is the cards doing their job: a whole hand to watch, with every trump's number in plain digits. Nothing needs activating, because a card here does its work by being played.