How to play Terziglio (Calabresella)
The rules of Terziglio, and a game played out one move at a time.
How to play Terziglio, the Calabresella card game: it is Tressette for three, you bid to play alone against the other two, and a 3 beats an ace. Read on, or press play and we deal one hand on the real table, stopping on every move to say why. Know Spades? Following suit is the same, minus the trumps.
Press play and we deal a short game of Terziglio on the real table. It stops on every move and says what just happened and what you could do next.
Three people, forty cards
Terziglio takes exactly three. Start with a standard 52-card deck and take out the 8s, 9s and 10s, which leaves forty. Each suit ranks 3, 2, ace, king, queen, jack, 7, 6, 5, 4, high to low, and there are no trumps. On an Italian deck the suits are swords, batons, cups and coins. Here they are spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds.
The dealer gives twelve cards each in packets of four and puts the last four cards face down in the middle. That pile is the monte. Play goes round to the right, counter-clockwise, and the seat after the dealer bids first. The table draws the first dealer, and the deal moves one seat after every hand.
The auction
You get one shot each: pass, or bid higher than the bid before. The bids, low to high, are chiamo, solo and solissimo, and solissimo closes the bidding. The dealer speaks last. Say the first seat passes, the second bids chiamo and the dealer bids solo. Solo is higher, so the dealer plays alone. If all three pass, nobody plays. The cards are thrown in and the next seat deals.
The highest bidder is the soloist, one player against the other two, who are partners for this hand only. In our opinion the auction is the part that takes a hand or two to learn, along with the count. The tricks are plain.
Chiamo, solo and solissimo
Chiamo means you call for a card, rank and suit, usually a high one you lack, such as a 3. If an opponent holds it, they pass it to you face up. If it is in the monte, nothing is passed. Here you cannot call a card you already hold.
Then turn the monte face up for everyone and take it. You hold sixteen cards, or seventeen if one was passed. Give one card of your choice back, face up, to the opponent who passed you one, and put any four face down as the new monte. Solo is the same without the call. Solissimo uses no monte and no exchange: nobody sees the monte until the end.
Playing the twelve tricks
The seat after the dealer leads to the first trick, except after solissimo, when the soloist leads. The leader may play any card. Everyone else must follow suit if they can, and may play anything if they cannot. The highest card of the suit led wins the trick and leads the next.
Rank is all that matters. If the ace of hearts is led and you hold the 3 of hearts, follow suit with it and you take the trick. An ace beats a king, and a card from another suit never wins.
Scoring: card values in thirds
An ace is a whole point, and each 3, 2, king, queen and jack is a third of one. The last trick is worth a whole point, and its winner also collects the monte. In all that is eleven and two thirds, and fractions are dropped when you count.
We show it in thirds: an ace is 3, the last trick is 3, and the 3, 2, king, queen and jack are 1 each, 35 in a hand. The four aces alone come to 12 of them. The soloist needs 6 whole points, which is 18 thirds. Seventeen thirds is five and two thirds, and the two thirds are dropped, so it is five: one whole point short. Exactly one side reaches 18, and that side wins the hand.
What a hand pays
The stake is the amount each opponent pays: 1 for chiamo, 2 for solo and 4 for solissimo. If the soloist wins, each opponent pays that stake. If the soloist fails, the soloist pays it to each of them. So a solo win is four up for you and two down for each of them, and the scores always add to zero.
Cappotto, one side taking all twelve tricks, doubles the stake. Stramazzo triples it. That is when the losing side does win a trick, but the cards in its tricks come to under a whole point. Here the monte and the last trick’s point do not count towards that. That leaves one odd hand. A side takes the last trick and a monte of four aces, 15 thirds between them, and holds two thirds in its tricks. That is 17 thirds, five whole points, so it loses 17 to 18, and it still pays triple.
Four players, or online
Pagat says the Calabresella card game can be played by four, with the dealer taking no cards for that hand. This table does not deal that way: it seats exactly three, and a room is the host and two guests, with no computer players. To play online, press Play with friends, make a table, and send each of the other two seats a link.
Terziglio is Tressette’s three-handed cousin, and Tressette is the one Pagat calls famous. Pagat puts it in the Tressette group of card games and lists Mediatore, Spizzichino and Traversone as relatives. We will not call Terziglio the most popular card game played in Italy, but Wikipedia dates one of its earliest references to 1822.
How a match ends
Each seat’s score adds up across hands. The first seat to reach the target wins, and if two cross in the same hand, the higher total does. A tie at the top means another hand. A match is first to 7 points unless the host picks 11 or 21. Twenty-one is the long game.
We follow Pagat’s rules for the hand. The match is ours: Pagat names no target, so we took 21 from Wikipedia and Treccani, added 7 and 11, and made it a race in which every stake moves all three scores. The tie-break is ours too. Left out: the aggravated solissimo, and any declarations, since Pagat gives none for this game. There are variations, and Pagat lists a simplified American one, Calabrasella, with packets of two and every value multiplied by three. We do not play it.