The Tarocco Piemontese (Tarot of Piedmont ) is a type of tarot deck of Italian origin. It is the most common tarot playing set in northern Italy, much more common than the Tarocco Bolognese. The most popular Piedmontese tarot games are Scarto, Mitigati, Chiamare il Re, and Partita which are played in Pinerolo and Turin. [1] [2] This deck is considered part of Piedmontese culture and appeared in the 2006 Winter Olympics closing ceremony held in Turin. As this was the standard tarot pack of the Kingdom of Sardinia, it was also formerly used in Savoy and Nice before their annexation by France. Additionally, it was used as an alternative to the Tarocco Siciliano in Calatafimi-Segesta, Sicily. [2] Outside of Italy, it is used by a small number of players in Ticino, Switzerland and was used by Italian Argentines. [3] [4]
This deck is not related to the non-tarot Piemontesi deck which uses French-suited hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. As such, their cards are not interchangeable.
This deck pattern was derived from the Tarot of Marseilles but was made reversible for modern game playing. [5] [6] It consists of 78 cards: a trump suit of 22 cards, numbered from 0 to 21, and four 14-card suits of swords (spade), batons (bastoni), cups (coppe), and coins (denari). Each suit has a king (re), queen (donna), knight (cavallo) and jack (unlabelled), pip cards numbered from 2 to 10, and an unnumbered card with an elaborate suit symbol which acts as the ace. Trumps and most pip cards have indices in modern Arabic numerals (for trumps, cups, and coins) or Roman numerals (for swords and batons). Unusually, in most games trump 20 outranks trump 21 (this may have been influenced by Bolognese games).
Suit | ||||
English | Swords | Cups | Coins | Clubs |
---|---|---|---|---|
Italian | Spade | Coppe | Denari | Bastoni |
Spanish | Espadas | Copas | Oros | Bastos |
Ace | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Jack | Knight | Queen | King | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cups | ||||||||||||||
Swords | ||||||||||||||
Batons | ||||||||||||||
Coins | ||||||||||||||
Trumps | ||||||||||||||
The order of the trumps, in most games played with this pack, is:
The Fool "il matto" (0) is played as an excuse: it can beat nothing, but can always be played to a trick, relieving the holder from the obligation to follow suit. In only two games recorded in the 18th and 19th centuries is the Fool treated as the lowest trump. [2]
Like in most tarot games outside of France and Sicily, the order of the cards in swords and batons is king, queen, knight, jack, X, IX, ... I, while in the ranking of the cards in cups and coins is king, queen, knight, jack, 1, 2, ... 10.
Tarot decks were in production in Pinerolo by 1505. The best description of 16th century Piedmontese tarot is by Francesco Piscina who wrote a discourse about it in Mondovì in 1565. [8] Although his details about the game are sparse, his terminology strongly implies Bolognese and Florentine influence. Like in tarocchini, he treats the imperial and papal trumps as equals, a feature which still survives in Asti. Like in Bologna, the highest trump is the Angel which outranks the World. Excluding Piedicavallo, [9] Piedmontese players persist in ranking the Angel as higher than the World despite their modern numbering. In addition, some players remove the lower ranking pip cards to create a 62-card deck like in Bologna; others go further to make a 54-card deck like in Cego. How Piscina ranked his trumps is very similar to two other 16th century lists from Lombardy. All three lists are similar to the ranking of a sole surviving deck produced by Jacques Viéville of Paris around 1650, which has features found in Bolognese, Florentine, and Ferrarese tarots. This has led to speculation that players from Northwest Italy may have used decks similar to Viéville's until around 1700 when economic collapse drove regional cardmakers out of business. As no cards before this period survive, this theory cannot by substantiated. [2] [3]
After the collapse, players resorted to importing the Tarot of Marseilles from France. When production resumed around 1735, the cards were almost identical to the Marseilles pattern, including the French captions. [10] Efforts to localize the cards began in the early 19th century eventually resulting in the double-ended cards of today by the end of that century. [11] [12] After Savoy and Nice were annexed by France, players there continued using this deck until 1900 when the Tarot Nouveau began to spread across the country. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an effort to create a competing deck in Chambéry using the Piedmontese version of the Paris pattern as the base for a new tarot pack, but ultimately proved unsuccessful. [2] Reproductions of this pack have been made since 1984. [13] [14]
A stripped deck or short deck (US), short pack or shortened pack (UK), is a set of playing cards reduced in size from a full pack or deck by the removal of a certain card or cards. The removed cards are usually pip cards, but can also be court cards or Tarot cards. Many card games use stripped decks, and stripped decks for popular games are commercially available.
Tarot is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, tarot-playing cards spread to most of Europe, evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and modern games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen. In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Thus, there are two distinct types of tarot packs in circulation: those used for card games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are occasionally used for cartomancy.
Tarocchini are point trick-taking tarot card games popular in Bologna, capital city of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy and has been confined mostly to this area. They are the diminutive form of tarocchi, referring to the reduction of the Bolognese pack from 78 to 62 cards, which probably occurred in the early 16th century.
In playing cards, a suit is one of the categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several pips (symbols) showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or additionally be indicated by the color printed on the card. The rank for each card is determined by the number of pips on it, except on face cards. Ranking indicates which cards within a suit are better, higher or more valuable than others, whereas there is no order between the suits unless defined in the rules of a specific card game. In most decks, there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called jokers.
The game of French Tarot is a trick-taking strategy tarot card game played by three to five players using a traditional 78-card tarot deck. The game is played in France and also in French-speaking Canada. It should not be confused with French tarot, which refers to all aspects of cartomancy and games using tarot cards in France.
Playing cards have been in Italy since the late 14th century. Until the mid 19th century, Italy was composed of many smaller independent states which led to the development of various regional patterns of playing cards; "Italian suited cards" normally only refer to cards originating from northeastern Italy around the former Republic of Venice, which are largely confined to northern Italy, parts of Switzerland, Dalmatia and southern Montenegro. Other parts of Italy traditionally use traditional local variants of Spanish suits, French suits or German suits.
The Tarot of Marseilles is a standard pattern of Italian-suited tarot pack with 78 cards that was very popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for playing tarot card games and is still produced today. It was probably created in Milan before spreading to much of France, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The name is sometimes spelt Tarot of Marseille, but the name recommended by the International Playing-Card Society is Tarot de Marseille, although it accepts the two English names as alternatives. It was the pack which led to the occult use of tarot cards, although today dedicated decks are produced for this purpose.
Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy. It is no longer widely played. Minchiate can also refer to the special deck of 97 playing cards used in the game. The deck is closely related to the tarot cards, but contains an expanded suit of trumps. The game was similar to but more complex than tarocchi. The minchiate represents a Florentine variant on the original game.
Trionfi are 15th-century Italian playing card trumps with allegorical content related to those used in tarocchi games. The general English expression "trump card" and the German "trumpfen" have developed from the Italian "Trionfi". Most cards feature the personification of a place or abstraction.
The Bourgeois Tarot deck is a mid-19th century pattern of tarot cards of German origin that is used for playing card games in western Europe and Canada. It is not designed for divinatory purposes. This deck is most commonly found in France, Belgian Wallonia, Swiss Romandy and the Canadian province of Québec for playing French Tarot; in southwest Germany for playing Cego and Dreierles; and in Denmark for Danish Tarok.
The Swiss Tarot deck is a 78-card deck used for the tarot card games Troccas and Troggu. It is also sometimes called the JJ Tarot due to the replacement of the usual second and fifth trumps with cards depicting Juno and Jupiter, or as 1JJ Tarot in reference to the catalog number of a common release of the deck by A.G. Müller.
Tarot games are card games played with tarot packs designed for card play and which have a permanent trump suit alongside the usual four card suits. The games and packs which English-speakers call by the French name tarot are called tarocchi in the original Italian, Tarock in German and similar words in other languages.
The Tarocco Siciliano is a tarot deck found in Sicily and is used to play Sicilian tarocchi. It is one of the three traditional Latin-suited tarot decks still used for games in Italy, the others being the more prevalent Tarocco Piemontese and the Tarocco Bolognese. The deck was heavily influenced by the Tarocco Bolognese and the Minchiate. It is also the only surviving tarot deck to use the Portuguese variation of the Latin suits of cups, coins, swords, and clubs which died out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Tarocco Bolognese is a tarot deck found in Bologna and is used to play tarocchini. It is a 62 card Italian suited deck which influenced the development of the Tarocco Siciliano and the obsolete Minchiate deck.
French-suited playing cards or French-suited cards are cards that use the French suits of trèfles, carreaux, cœurs, and piques. Each suit contains three or four face/court cards. In a standard 52-card deck these are the valet, the dame, and the roi (king). In addition, in Tarot packs, there is a cavalier (knight) ranking between the queen and the jack. Aside from these aspects, decks can include a wide variety of regional and national patterns, which often have different deck sizes. In comparison to Spanish, Italian, German, and Swiss playing cards, French cards are the most widespread due to the geopolitical, commercial, and cultural influence of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other reasons for their popularity were the simplicity of the suit insignia, which simplifies mass production, and the popularity of whist and contract bridge. The English pattern of French-suited cards is so widespread that it is also known as the International or Anglo-American pattern.
Industrie und Glück is a pattern of French suited playing cards used to play tarock. The name originates from an inscription found on the second trump card. This deck was developed during the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The earliest known examples were made in Vienna in 1815. After the collapse of the empire in World War I, it remained the most widely used tarot deck in Central Europe and can be found throughout the former parts of the empire.
Scarto is a three player trick-taking tarot card game from Piedmont, Italy. It is a simple tarot game which can serve as an introduction to more complex tarot games. The name comes from the discarded cards that were exchanged with the stock, which is also the origin of the name for the Skat card game.
The Fool is one of the 78 cards in a tarot deck. Traditionally, it is the lowest of the 22 trump cards, in tarot card reading called the 22 Major Arcana. However, in tarot card games it developed to be not one of the trump cards but a special card, serving a unique purpose by itself. In later Central European tarot card games, it re-developed to now become the highest trump. As a consequence and with respect to his unique history, The Fool is usually an unnumbered card with a unique design; but sometimes it is numbered as 0 or more rarely XXII. Design and numbering-or-not to not clearly indicate its role as a trump or special card in the specific game.
Droggn, sometimes called French Tarock is an extinct card game of the Tarock family for three players that was played in the Stubai valley in Tyrol, Austria until the 1980s. Droggn is originally local dialect for "to play Tarock", but it has become the proper name of this specific Tarock variant. An unusual feature of the game compared with other Tarock games is the use of a 66-card deck and that, until recently, there was no record in the literature of a 66-card game and no current manufacturers of such a deck. The structure of the game strongly indicates that it is descended from the later version of Tarok l'Hombre, a 78-card Tarock game popular in 19th-century Austria and Germany, but with the subsequent addition of two higher bids.
Portuguese-suited playing cards or Portuguese-suited cards are a nearly extinct suit-system of playing cards that survive in a few towns in Sicily and Japan. Although not of Portuguese origin, they were named after the country because Portugal was the last European nation to use them on a large basis. They are very similar to Spanish-suited playing cards in that they use the Latin-suit system of cups, swords, coins and clubs. However, this system featured straight swords and knobbly clubs like the Spanish suits but intersected them like the northern Italian suits. The Aces featured dragons and the knaves were all distinctly female. The arrangement of the cups and coins are also slightly different: