Thanks for explaining the difference between the two towns' versions. Perhaps you can say more about "calling for a trump". Not just any player can "call", I observed - most just "passed". I thought it had to be one of the "aire", too, that was called for. Perhaps you know more. I don't fully under...

Then in the evening came the presentation and practice session of Sicilian tarocchi, of a particular sort found in one or maybe two Sicilian towns. It was a partnership game in which the partners change each hand, and who they are is known to only one of the players. I never would have imagined suc...

I am not sure why it should be hard to trump a king if there is no discard. If you get rid of your lower pips fast, and conserve any of the trumps, a trump can be used to take a king, like in normal Tarot. The main difference between the ratio of Trumps to court cards between to the two games seems...

For point values we are therefore left to the analogy of Tarot, with the basic rule that kings count the same as at least four of the Trumps. I say four Trumps on the assumption of Bolognese rules being the closest to the original, and also on the fact of the fourfold structure of Marizano's game. ...

I've taken the liberty of uploading the original query and Pinkerton's response here: https://imgur.com/a/6xSpq0T Pinkerton has done his research. He quotes Lollio, dismisses Gebelin's Egyptian claims, he knows where they are manufactured and exported to, that there are regional differences in how t...

Regarding Pinkerton, he knew about Minchiati which he described as having forty-one atouts (note the French terminology), so he could also be familiar with the rules of the game and "corrected" the New Orleans players corruption of verzicole who may have been playing another form of tarot, namely wh...

mikeh wrote: ↑

24 Jun 2019, 02:05

Now I seem to remember that the de Mellet essay was also translated on Tarotpedia. Is that possible?

Yes, it was also translated: https://web.archive.org/web/20161022015 ... les_Tarots

Tarotpedia once had a good translation. I think it's still in some archive, but I don't have the computer savvy to find it. It should be posted here. If nobody can find it, I suppose someday I can correct this new one (or you can), which would be easier than starting from scratch. But I hate to spe...

The theme of the four empires has its roots in the translatio imperii theory popular since the middle ages. I doubt it is a tradition within card games but rather a result of writers independently trying to interpret the suits using translatio imperii to explain decks' fourfold division and kings. L...

But in Marziano's game, there are only four court cards, the Kings. That doesn't add up to much of an interesting game, if the trumps are mostly empty. So it seems worthwhile to imagine that assembling combinations of trumps also counted for points, and the easiest combinations to imagine, based on...