Machiavelli rules in Poker

Card games, you know, are never enough. Many know the "usual suspects" such as poker, broom, briscola or burraco yet there are many others, some practically unknown. Today we want to introduce you to the "Machiavelli". It is a card game very similar to Scala Quaranta from which it differs due to some fundamental points that we will see below.

The first point concerns the lack of need to open. This is given by the possibility of dropping combinations from the very first moment, even when you have less than 40 points in your hand.

The second point is that runs can continue on either side of the ace.

The third difference is given by the fact that the player who has to move the turn can take back the combinations already dropped or put them back together in different combinations provided that he drops all the cards he took back plus one of his own. Ultimately, the player can only draw if he cannot play any cards.

The game takes its name from the political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, a man capable of extraordinary cunning and capable of overturning the fate of a city. Similarly, the player - by drawing again - can turn the tide of a game.

Now let's see how the rules work. When a player "closes" the game it means that he is out of cards and has therefore won. The other players will have to count the cards, the score of which is as follows: 25 points for joker, 11 for aces, 10 for face cards and cards between 2 and 10 are worth as much as the number on the card.

To play it is sufficient to have two packs of 52 French cards. The dealer distributes 9 cards to each player and, at the end of the distribution, the heel, i.e. the remaining part of the deck with the top card face down, is placed on the table. Each player takes turns drawing a card and playing a meld.

Combinations can be three of a kind or four, i.e. cards of the same value and of different suits. Three cards of the value equal to respectively diamonds, hearts and spades can be used. Then there is the scale which is made up of at least three consecutive cards of the same suit. Other cards can then be added to melds to produce new melds.

In Machiavelli there is then the Jolly, a card capable of assuming every possible value and every suit that the player needs at that moment. As mentioned, the game ends when a player runs out of cards and the winner will be the one who has accumulated the least amount of points during the game.

Enthusiasts will have noticed quite obvious similarities with other more famous card games such as blackjack online. Among these, there is certainly Rummy which resembles Machiavelli both for the calculation of scores and - in part - for the general rules of the game. Above all, we are in the presence of two games that allow you to modify the cards that have been placed on the table and reuse them to produce new combinations and your own valid combinations.