Aug
28
Session report: French Tarot
Filed Under Session
It’s fun to play games and it’s even more fun to do it unexpectedly but this was the case in our little Tarot session in Wednesday night. My gaming pal Markku was in town because of his work and looked for something to do other than playing games in BSW (which by the way is a great way to spend time). We didn’t have much time to arrange the event but were lucky enough to have Janne to play with us.
As all three of us are seriously into card games it was no wonder that we immediately began to think of a card game for three. I suggested French Tarot which I had learned in Ropecon and found out to be fun and not overly complex Tarot game. Others had not played it and were willing to try this beast out.
French Tarot is played with 78 card French Tarot deck which I don’t own (ordered it though to avoid similar situation in the future). Luckily these games cand be played with others decks as long as there’s the same amount of cards in them and I had my 78 card Piemontese deck with Italian suits with me. Obviously this made the game a bit harder since none of us had played much with the Italian suits and figuring out what we had in our hands after the deal was rather hard.
21 trumps of a game of Tarot
The game itself is of moderate challenge. The trick taking part of the game is simple for those who have played any trick taking games before; one player plays against the others and tries to win enough tricks to score adequate amount of card points. What makes the game a little bit tougher that typical trick taking games is the auction of who gets to play. The amount of card points you have to win depends on the ends (tarot 21,0 and fool) you win from the tricks. To make the bidding a bit more challenging there’s also a dog of six cards on the table which you can use (in a way or another) if you win the auction. Typically you get the cards on the table and change some cards from your hand to those but there are other possibilities for the dog as well.
Bidding is quite harsh because if you win you get a number of points from the opponents and if you lose you pay the same amount of points to all of your opponents. This leads to a situation where failing a high bid can really ruin your game because you score a stupendous negative score. Janne basically tried this option in our game in the second deal and did not recover from it and helped me and Markku quite a bit since we got the points Janne lost.
I liked the game and hope to play it soon again. These games need experience to be most enjoyable and after one or two plays one can only feel that thay are great games if you master them well.
Comments
Leave a Reply