Game Review: French Tarot

This is a review completely written on stream.

When it comes to the word tarot, many people will think of the large cards with ornate designes used in cartomancy. Arcana, pentacles, these kinds of mystical whatevers are what the average person thinks of when tarot is mentioned. It's a shame in my opinion that thanks to this occult perception people are missing out on an interesting family of card games that gave rise to the modern trump suit, games with their own interesting features and concepts that are both complex and fun.

While the place you can most commonly find these games are in Central and Eastern Europe, the game that might be more suited for beginners is from France, with its relatively simple rules and gameplay.

Four players play cutthroat counter-clockwise. The French tarot deck consists of 78 cards: 54 plain-suited cards, 21 trump cards and an umarked fool card depicting a bard. The goal is to score the most points by bidding and fulfilling contracts of collecting the majority of card points in tricks. The high-scoring cards are the kings and the bouts: the 1 of trump, the 21 of trump and the fool.

Players are dealt 18 cards each, leaving six as the chien. Bidding starts with the player to the dealer's right and consists of only one round. The four contracts are petit and garde, both involving the contractor picking up the chien and discarding cards, garde being double the value of petit; garde sans le chien, where the cards of the chien are untoched but count for the player; and garde contre le chien, where the untouched chien scores for the opposing team.

After the bidding the contractor, if the contract allows, picks up the cards from the chien and discards six cards. Kings and bouts cannot be discarded, and trumps are only discarded if there is no other choice, which trump is discarded must be announced.

The player to the dealer's right leads the first trick, the winner of the trick leads to the next. Players must follow suit, if unable must play a trump and a higher trump than the one in play, otherwise they can play any card. The fool in this game serves as an excuse card, where the player can play it in any trick even if he could follow suit, but it will always lose the trick, though the team of whoever played it gets to keep it. If you lead the fool, the next card played becomes the led suit. The only notable exception is if a player has won 17 tricks and leads the fool, it wins the trick.

After all 18 tricks have been played, cards are then counted in a fractional system. Kings and bouts score 4.5, queens 3.5, cavaliers 2.5, jacks 1.5 and everything else 0.5. The number of points to try to get changes depending on the number of bouts the contractor wins, but the logic remains that he has to win the majority.

The final score is then calculated based on the value of the contract and the card points won relative to the needed goal and whoever wins the trump 1 in the last trick if applicabel, along with bonuses if they are fulfilled. These two bonuses are poignée, an announcement of having 10 or more trumps and chelem, where one player wins all the tricks announced or unannounced. The points are transferred from one player to another and is therefore a zero-sum game.

If you want to play this interesting game you will have to find the right deck. The ones you know won't cut it, it has to be a French-suited deck made for the game. Also worth noting is that there are no aces, what would be the ace is in this case a 1.

The large number of cards makes this game a game of calculation, even with the existence of a longer permanent trump suit. Counting cards is important as someone with a short suit can trump a valuable trick to your disadvantage. There is then a strategic aspect in trump play both in trying to win valuable tricks and forcing opposing trumps out. Trumps still play an important part of the game, though, so a good biddable hand still needs a good amount of trump cards to assist the bouts. Plain suit tricks play a bigger part in this than the games with shorter decks, and so it's still worth thinking like a bridge player in this game.

Unlike other games in this family, French Tarot has a requirement to overtrump, this can cause situations where valuable trumps can fall victim to dud tricks as you are not allowed to duck as even if you don't have a higher trump you must still play a trump.

The petit au bout bonus is an interesting aspect of the game, where the player must try to keep the lowest trump to play to the last trick and ensure that no other trumps are in play. The opposite is the goal for everyone else. Petit au bout is not too strong a feature in French tarot but is important in other games to the point that there are bids solely to do this one trick.

Excuse cards rarely occur in modern card games, but the mechanism allows some tactical advantage for the player who holds it. From guarding a suit to keeping a card from being played, the card is worth its value as a bout. Later tarot games simply upgrade the fool to the highest trump.

With only one bout available to be caught, much of the value of the tricks lie in the kings, and being able to catch kings in tricks is an important aspect of the game as 4.5 points is nothing to laugh at in this game.

All in all, French tarot is an interesting game that one shouldn't overlook just because of its unusual deck and unfamiliar cards. There is a reason why this form of deck remains as one of the most popular playing card extensions to this day.