Tarot (game)

Tarot is a trick-taking card game played throughout France and also known in French-speaking Canada, which uses a traditional 78-card Tarot deck instead of the standard poker deck. The Fédération Française de Tarot publishes official rules for Tarot. The game is sometimes referred to in English as French tarot; for example, the French name of the annual Montreal festival Festival International de Tarot de Montréal is officially translated into English as International French Tarot Festival of Montreal.

The deck

The game of Tarot is played using a 78-card set following the Tarot de Marseille arrangement, divided into a numbered 21-card series of atouts (trump cards), one Fool (l'excuse), and 4 suits (spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs), divided into 10 numbers from 1 to 10, and then the face cards of jack (valet), knight (cavalier), queen (dame) and king (roi). Three cards known as oudlers or bouts are of particular importance: the excuse (the Fool), the 1 of trumps the petit or (The Magician), and the 21 of trumps (The World).

Rules

For 3 or 4 players (5 with a simple variation). The 4-player variant is usually considered the most challenging and is the one played in competitions.

Setup

Deal out the entire deck; deal equal hands to each of the players, plus six cards to the "dog" (chien in French, also commonly translated as "kitty"), a face-down pile in the middle of the table. Each player is dealt his cards three at a time, and the dog is dealt one card at a time at anytime the dealer wishes except for the first and last card dealt, which can't be part of the dog.

Players inspect and evaluate their hands and move on to the bidding round.

Bidding

The players look at the cards they have been dealt, and a round of bidding begins, starting from the player to the right of the dealer. One may only bid higher than the previous bidders.

The bids are, in increasing importance:

prise (take) or petite (small)
garde (guard): the same as prise, but the chief wins or loses double the usual stake.
garde sans chien (guard without dog): the dog goes directly into the chief's score pile, and no-one gets to see it until the end of the hand. The score is counted normally against the target number, but it is worth double the garde score to whoever wins the hand.
garde contre chien (guard against dog): the dog goes directly into the communal score pile, without being shown until the end of the hand. The score is counted normally against the target number, but it is worth triple the engarde score to whoever wins the hand.

In earlier rules, still played outside of competitions, in place of the prise and simple garde, there were two bids, in increasing importance: the petite (small) and the pousse (push). The prise is still sometimes known as petite.

Main phase

The player to the right of the chief leads the first trick, and the play proceeds counter-clockwise, with every player adding a card from his hand to the trick. Every subsequent trick is led by the player who took the last trick. The leader of a trick must play a pip or face card, unless he doesn't have any, at which point he must play a trump.

Once the leader of a trick has played a card, everyone else must follow suit (play a card of that same suit, if they have one). If a player cannot follow suit, he must play a trump card, which beats everything except higher-valued trump (The Magician is valued lowest, and the World is valued highest). If he has no pip or face card matching suit and no trump, he must ‘trash’ a card into the trick. If the trick is led with a trump, all other players must play a trump card, or trash a card if they can not. Trashed cards are not considered for taking the trick, but are scored normally.

The only card with a special effect is the Fool, called the ‘excuse.’. The Fool may be played on any trick: it "excuses" the player from following suit. However it never wins the trick. The Fool remains the property of the person who played it, not the winner of that trick: to compensate for this in the scoring count, the owner of the Fool should instead give the winner of the trick a half-point card from his pile of previously won tricks. When the last trick has been played, the game ends.

Scoring

The chief needs to score at least 56 points to win. The Fool, Magician (1 of trumps), and World (21 of trumps) are special scoring cards called oudlers. If the chief has one oudler his target score is reduced by five; if he has two, by fifteen; if he has all three, by twenty. Kings and oudlers are worth 4½ points, Queens are worth 3½, Knights are worth 2½ and Pages are worth 1½. All other cards are worth ½ point. If the chief beats his target score, he wins 25 points plus 1 for each point scored in excess of the target, otherwise all of the other players gain 25 points plus the deficit. All of these scores are multiplied by the appropriate multiplier (1, 2, 4 or 6) for the bid. The two score piles are stacked (there is no shuffling in Tarot except for the ‘soft shuffling’ that occurs during play) and the player to the right of the last dealer deals the next hand.

Five-player variant

The dog consists of three cards. After calling the dog and scoring his three cards, the chief calls the King of any suit. Whoever has that King becomes the chief's partner, and plays with him against the other players. (Compare the Austrian version, Tarock, in which this King-calling mechanism is used so that four-player play is two against two.) If the chief has all four kings, he calls a queen. If the chief has all four kings and all four queens, he calls a knight. The chief must play alone if he has all kings, queens and knights. In some variants, the King is called before calling the dog, so the chief may accidentally call himself.

External links

Rules of the game at pagat.com
Fédération Française de Tarot official website including rules (in French)
general informations to the game Tarot
Tarot Museum
Tarot USA(in French)
Shogix.net
American Tarot Game Association
Phoenix French Tarot Club
Fédération Québécoise de Tarot(in French)

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