Casino

Casino: the card game where you do arithmetic to win

Casino is the best-known member of the fishing family — games where a shared pool of cards lies face up in the middle and you take from it with the cards in your hand. What makes this one worth learning is the way you take: not just by matching a rank, but by matching a total. A nine takes a nine, and it also takes a four and a five sitting side by side, and it takes both in the same play. Add the ability to declare a pile at a value and defend it, and you get a game that feels less like a card game and more like a slow, polite argument conducted in sums.

Where Casino comes from

Casino belongs to a Mediterranean tradition of fishing games far older than its English name. Its close relatives are still played daily across southern Europe and beyond: Scopa and Scopone in Italy, where a sweep of the table is literally a "broom"; Cuarenta in Ecuador; Basra around the eastern Mediterranean; Zwicker in northern Germany. The family's defining idea — capture by arithmetic, not by rank alone — is the same in all of them.

The English version is documented in card books by the end of the eighteenth century, and the trail before that is thin in the usual way for folk games. Where it caught on hardest was Scandinavia and the United States, and in America it settled into the eleven-point scoring on this page and stayed there. It is one of the few traditional games that rewards straightforward mental arithmetic, which is why it has been quietly recommended as a children's game by people who would never describe it as educational to the children.

The objective

Capture cards. At the end of each round, the cards you've captured are scored for what's in them — how many you have, how many spades, and a few specific cards worth points on their own. First to 21 points wins, which normally takes three or four rounds.

Setup

A standard 52-card deck. Every player is dealt four cards, and four more go face up in the middle to start the table. The rest becomes the deck. When everybody's hand is empty, four more are dealt to each player — but never again to the table — and this repeats until the deck runs out. Play passes to the left, starting with the player after the dealer.

The deck divides exactly at two, three and four players, so a round always ends cleanly with the last card played. Aces count as one. Jacks, queens and kings have no numeric value at all, which is the single most important thing to remember about them.

What you can do with a card

On your turn you play exactly one card from your hand, and it does exactly one of three things.

1. Capture. Take any table card of the same rank, and any group of table cards that adds up to your card's value — as many separate groups as you can find, all in one play.
2. Build. Lay your card onto table cards to declare a pile at a value, which you intend to capture on a later turn. You must be holding a card that can take it.
3. Trail. Do neither, and simply leave the card face up on the table for everybody else to shoot at.

Building, and the arguments it causes

Building is what separates Casino from every other fishing game, and it is where new players get into trouble. A build is a public promise: you are announcing a value and saying you can finish it.

One consequence is worth stating because it looks like a bug and isn't. If you build, then spend your capturing card on something else, your build can outlive every card that could take it — new deals included, since builds sit on the table across them. The no-trailing rule would then leave you with no legal move at all, so on this table it lifts for that turn and the board tells you why. It is rare: across fifteen thousand simulated plays it came up eight times.

Sweeps, and the end of the round

Capture everything on the table at once and you have made a sweep, worth a point on its own, and the next player has to trail because there is nothing left to shoot at. Sweeps are the game's small fireworks — about one a round in practice — and they are the main reason not to leave the table down to a single easy card.

When the last card of the last hand is played, whoever captured most recently collects whatever is still lying on the table, builds included. That is a housekeeping rule rather than a reward: it deliberately does not count as a sweep, though it can quietly decide who wins the three points for most cards.

Scoring the round

Strategy that actually matters

• Count cards before you count points. Three points for most cards is the biggest single prize in the game, and it is won by hoovering up quantity rather than by chasing the glamorous cards. Taking two cards is usually better than taking one, even when the one is prettier.
• Spades are worth more than they look. There's a point for most spades, the two of spades scores on its own, and the ace of spades scores twice over — as an ace and as a spade. Given a genuine choice between equal captures, take the one with the spade in it.
• Build, don't trail. This one is measurable. A bot identical to this table's opponents except that it never declared a build lost to the normal one 67.0% ±2.1 of decided games. Trailing hands the initiative to whoever plays next; building takes cards off the table on your terms.
• Watch what a build tells everyone. Declaring eight announces that you hold an eight. A player paying attention now knows one card in your hand for certain — and if they hold the other eights, your build is in real danger of being taken from under you.
• Double when you're threatened, not when you're comfortable. A double build can't be raised, so it is the right answer to an opponent who keeps stealing your piles. It is also a bigger prize sitting in the middle if they take it anyway.
• Trail low, and trail awkwardly. When you must leave a card, leave one that is hard to use. A low card invites a build; a nine or a ten is a harder thing for the next player to fold into anything.
• Remember the ten of diamonds and the two of spades. Three points sit in those two cards. Both are ordinary in every other respect and both are easy to let slide past while you're busy doing arithmetic.

Common variations

Casino has been house-ruled for two centuries, and the versions below are all widely played.

• Royal Casino gives the court cards numbers — jack 11, queen 12, king 13 — so they can capture by sum and be built with like anything else. Aces may count 1 or 14. It is the most popular variation by some distance, and it removes the odd dead weight the courts otherwise carry.
• Draw Casino deals four cards once and then has each player draw a replacement after every turn, so hands stay at four and the deck runs out all at once. It makes the game faster and much harder to count.
• Spade Casino scores every spade individually — ace of spades 2, two of spades 2, jack of spades 2, and one point for each of the rest — which shifts the whole game onto one suit and pushes the target score up to 61, traditionally kept on a cribbage board.
• Partnership Casino pairs four players across the table, pooling captures. It changes building completely: a build your partner can finish is as good as one you can.
• Court cards, one at a time. Some tables rule that a jack takes only one other jack even when two are showing, rather than both at once. This table plays the simpler rule — a card takes every matching rank on the table — so if it matters to your group, agree before you start.
• Sweeps ignored. A minority of tables don't score sweeps at all, which makes the round worth a flat eleven and takes a good deal of the drama out of it.