Tarocco Siciliano: Sicilian Tarocchi with friends or the computer

What Tarocco Siciliano means: a pack, and a game

Two things share the name. The Tarocco Siciliano is the pack, sixty-three cards. Sicilian Tarocchi is the game played with it. Tarocchi is the Italian word for what English calls tarot, and the pack was invented in northern Italy around 1425 for a trick-taking game, back when the trumps were called trionfi. The occult side came much later and did not reach print until 1781. If a reading is what you came for, Tarot for Two is the table for that. This is not it.

Sicily has its own history. The Viceroy introduced tarot to the island in 1663, going by the Marchese di Villabianca, according to the Association in Catania that keeps the game alive. Newer documents, it adds, suggest cards were being made in Palermo by 1630. Two versions arrived in the 17th century, the 78-card tarot and the 97-card Gallerini, Pagat notes. In the 18th century the 78-card pack was cut down, and by the 1780s, Pagat presumes, it was sometimes cut to 63 by dropping the lowest numbers in the suits. The 63-card pack stuck. It is one of three traditional tarot decks still played in Italy, with the Tarocco Piemontese and the Tarocco Bolognese, and Wikipedia says the Bolognese and the Minchiate shaped it.

Not many people play it now. A few in Mineo and nearby Palagonia and Grammichele, Pagat says, and the Association counts four places where it survived from the 1950s: Tortorici and Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto in Messina province, Mineo near Catania, and Calatafimi in Trapani. Our rule of thumb is that the best card game with friends is one where everyone knows the rules or nobody does. Odds are nobody at your table has played this one, so it suits us fine.

What is in the pack, and what is missing from it

Count them. Twenty trumps numbered 20 down to 1, and under the 1 an unnumbered trump, Miseria, a chained beggar. The Fool. Then four suits, cups, coins, swords and batons, each running King, Queen, Horse, Maid, then the number cards, 10 down to 5. Coins keep a 4 as well. That is 21 trumps, the Fool and 41 suit cards: 63. Decks on sale, the Modiano among them, carry a 64th card, the ace of coins, added in the 19th century only to hold the tax stamp. Mineo never deals it, and neither does this table. If you own a real pack, leave that ace in the box.

A few oddities. The Maid, donna, is a female knave on foot, so every suit has two ranks of women, and Wikipedia says no other traditional pack that survives does that, which makes this one unique. Where other tarots have a Devil there is a ship, and there is no Pope or Popess, only a trump called Costanza, Constancy, at 4, a fourth virtue beside Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. The highest trump is Giove, Jupiter. The 1 is known as i Picciotti, the young men, and with the 20 and the Fool it is worth 10 points. Unlike most tarot games, the number cards rank the plain way in every suit, 10 over 5. The suit signs are Spanish-style, straight swords and knobbly batons, and they follow the old Portuguese pattern, swords and batons crossed.

Our pictures are new digital art made for this table, so they are not a copy of the Modiano deck, and their swords and batons are not crossed the way its are. Every face carries its Italian title, Giove, Sole, Luna, so you pick up the names as you play. The board adds a corner chip with the rank and, when a card is worth more than one, its points, so a fanned hand reads at a glance.

Mineo, and how the other towns play it differently

Sicilian Tarocchi is a family of games, one for each town that kept it. We deal the Mineo game, named for the town in the province of Catania. It is, in Pagat’s words, “the most traditional and arguably the most interesting surviving form of the game”, and it comes in two forms, for three seats and for four, which is why a table here seats three or four.

The neighbours play something else. Tortorici, in Messina province, scores the gap between your card points and a target, and uses the ace of coins in place of the 4. Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto deals all 64 cards at four seats, sixteen each, with no bidding. Calatafimi, in Trapani, adapted a 78-card Piedmontese pack by throwing out the low cards. Ragusa scores only the last trick. We leave all of those out.

We follow Pagat’s written Mineo rules, checked against the Association’s pages and rule PDFs. Where they differ or say nothing we picked one way, and the how-to page says which. Some tables have the soloist lead the first trick, for one. We have the seat after the bidder lead, as the written rule does.

A hand in short, and a count worked through

Cards go out five at a time, and after each packet everyone speaks. On five cards you can say passo (pass), altre cinque (five more) or vado solo (I play alone). A solo on five cards is a stata, and every payment for the hand is doubled. If all pass, the deal is abandoned and nobody scores. Later rounds add pago (I will pay one jocu to abandon) and prendo (I will take it). At twenty cards each, three cards are left, the monte. The soloist takes it, discards three face down, and needs 55 of the 109 card points.

At four seats you hold 15 cards and can call instead. Name the highest trump you do not hold, the 20 if you lack it, and whoever holds that trump is your partner, silently, until the trump is played. Nobody else is told, and neither are you. If the trump is in the monte you have no partner and play alone against three.

The cards carry the points. The 20, the 1 and the Fool are worth 10 each, trumps 16 to 19 and the Kings 5, Queens 4, Horses 3, Maids 2, and everything else 1. Points are counted in threes, taking 2 off each batch of three. So trumps 20, 9 and 6 come to 10 plus 1 plus 1, minus 2, which is 10. A Queen, a Horse and a 7 come to 6. The last trick adds 5, and the two sides always total 109.

Now a whole hand. The soloist’s side wins the last trick and 55 or more points, and captures the trump 1 and the 17 from the others, while they capture the 18. Each capture of a counting trump is a jocu, a pigliata, so that is four jochi against one, a net of three. At three seats the soloist collects twice the net, 6, and each opponent pays 3. Bid on five cards, the stata doubles that to 12 and 6. Alone at four seats the soloist collects three times the net, 9, and each opponent pays 3.

What this table does, and what it does not

At the computer table you face two computers, or three for a four-seat hand. A pair of buttons, 2 and 3, changes that and restarts the match, and the choice is remembered on your device. Or start a room, pick three or four seats and send each person a link. A four-seat table that is still waiting can start with three, and then plays as a three-seat game. There is chat while you play, and voice if whoever opened the table switched it on. Nothing to install and no sign-up. It is free, with the odd ad that we aim to keep discreet. A table waits 48 hours.

The table keeps the rules so you do not have to. It will not let you play a card that breaks the follow-suit rule, and the status line says why: follow the suit, play a trump, the Fool cannot lead. The announcement buttons switch off when the rules do not allow that announcement, and say why. At the count it lists every jocu and every seat’s payment. The server shuffles and deals, so no screen ever holds another seat’s cards, and the monte stays face down until it is turned up. Only the dealer may look at it early, one card at the start and all three once the last packet is out, as the written rules let a dealer. At four seats only the holder of the called trump knows who the partner is, and the caller is not told, until that trump falls.

The computers see what you see: their own cards and the cards already played, never your hand. They make the same legal moves you can and answer after a beat. They announce and discard by rules of thumb, and at four seats they work out who is partnered with whom from the tricks, the way you have to.

Some things are left out on purpose. In Mineo the two opponents may talk in set phrases, “Faglio” to lead the soloist’s void, for one. A room has no team channel, and one would give away the hidden partner at four seats, so there is no table talk. There is no money either: the jochi are game points. Also out are the ace-of-coins packs, the other towns’ games, Palagonia’s solo at any round, a computer seat inside a room, and other languages.

This is not the only way to play it. Pagat lists two free platforms for the Mineo game, one that opens in a browser and one you install, and if your group already knows the game they are worth a look. What we add is a table that checks every move and counts the jochi, and computers for when nobody is around.