For most of its history, tarot was known primarily as a card game. Although somewhat obscure today, it was once tremendously popular. Even if you appreciate tarot cards as a divination tool or as an artifact of popular culture, you may be curious about the game. How is it played?
Much of the 600 pages of Michael Dummett's impressive tome, The Game of Tarot, is devoted to detailing the many games that have been played with tarot cards and their rules. There are some web sites that present official rules for one variant of the game or another. (See, for example, Game Report: Early French Tarot or the comprehensive Card Games site.) There is a very nice shareware tarot program called Objective Tarot that you can download and practice with. (The software is in French, but if you refer to the rules for French Tarot from the Card Games site, it should be clear enough for English speakers.) What I present here is a very basic form of the game, including most of the basic features found in the countless variants. If you want to learn the game of tarot simply to satisfy curiosity and gain an appreciation for how early players thought of the cards, I think you will find these basic rules valuable. If you want to seek out modern-day tarot players and enter tournaments, you are advised to look up the official rules of the modern forms of the game.
It is best to have 3 or more players (the original game was probably designed for 3) although you can play with two if need be. The dealer shuffles the pack and deals out the entire deck. If there are more than 3 players, there will be some cards left over. These are taken by the dealer, who must discard an equal number of cards. The dealer keeps these discards, to be counted toward his or her total at the end of the game.
The player to the dealer's right leads, by playing any card from his or her hand. Other players must play a card of the same suit, if they have one. If not, they must play a trump card. If they have neither the proper suit nor a trump, they must play a card of another suit, thereby losing it. Each "trick" is won by the highest ranking card of the suit led (if no trumps were played), or by the highest ranking trump, if there were any. In traditional forms of the game, the cards within each suit rank as follows (from high to low):
swords and batons: King - Queen - Knight - Page - 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6- 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - ace
cups and coins: King - Queen - Knight - Page - ace - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 -7 - 8 - 9- 10
There is a special rule regarding the Fool. The Fool may be played at any time, regardless of whether the player holds cards of the suit led or trump cards. The Fool never wins a trick, however. The Fool is thus an "excuse", used when you prefer to not to play any of the other cards you hold. The player who plays the Fool gets to keep it, handing over another card previously won to the winner of the trick, as a replacement for the Fool.
Whoever wins the trick gets to lead the next trick. Play continues in this fashion until all the cards have been played.
The winner is determined by counting points. Players score 1 point for every trick they win, plus extra points for the "counting cards":
Often, the points are totalled in a peculiar way. The player groups the cards won into groups, each having the same number of cards as a trick, but trying to place exactly one counting card in each group, if possible. Each group thus counts one point more than the counting card(s) included in the group. If there are no counting cards in a group, the group counts 1 point. This method means you don't have to go through your cards twice, once to count tricks and once to count counting cards. After doing this awhile, it becomes quite natural, and you start to think of kings as worth 5, queens worth 4, and so on, because that is the value of the groups they usually land in when counted.
If you are playing with two or three players, you may find dealing out the entire deck unwieldly. If so, you can decide to deal only half the deck per round.
Strategy: this is a very subtle game, which may take some practice to really master. To begin, remember that most of the points (52 out of 78 in a three-handed game) are in the couting cards, rather than in the tricks won, and most of the couting cards are court cards. In simplistic terms, then, the goal is to capture court cards, particularly queens and kings. The most likely way for this to happen is if you are out of suit cards for the suit led, but still have trumps in hand. There is thus a certain advantage to playing your kings and queens near the beginning of the game, when other players are likely to still have pip cards of the same suit which they must play, losing the trick. Don't hoard your trumps. Except for the Bagatto and the World, they have no intrinsic value. Their value is in their ability to capture court cards. So if you have an opportunity to take a king or queen with a high-ranking trump, play it! Don't save it for a rainy day--you may end up winning a trick consisting of only trumps, giving no extra points at all! A good time to play the Fool is when you would otherwise be forced to lose a counting card: for example, when the only cards you have of the suit led are court cards, and another player has played the king or a trump.
This basic form of tarot is easy to learn, but is still tremendous fun to play. You will find that it is a very well designed game. The rules and point values of the cards combine to make it strategically challenging. It is not just a game of chance. Get together some friends and try it out! It's best to have a more or less traditional pack, with pips for the number cards (Tarot of Marseilles and Swiss 1JJ are readily obtained decks suitable for gaming). If your friends are unfamiliar with the structure of a tarot pack, be sure to point out possible points of confusion--swords are curved, batons are straight. Justice is not to be mistaken for the Queen of Swords, nor the Emperor for the King of Batons.
For a real time-travel experience, play with a Visconti-Sforza reproduction deck, and refer to the cards by their old Italian titles!