GIACOMOTTO

We discovered this great card game recently, My friend Nikola grew up playing this game in Serbia and that’s actually how he learned counting…

Here is the game:
The objective is to gather as much cards as possible from the table into your own stack of cards. there can be 2 or 4 players (4 players is 2 against 2 like bridge).

You start the game by giving 6 cards to each player and put 4 uncovered cards on the table. The suits don’t matter in this game.
The cards have the following values:
2 to 10 = 2 to 10 (same)
Ace = 1 or 11 (as you want)
J, Q, K = 12, 13, 14

The first one to play needs to find a sum of the cards on the table that match one of his own cards in his hands, then put those cards in his stack (the one in his hand and the ones that make the sum as well), then the next player goes. If the particular sum occurs several times on the table you can take all the cards that make this sum. For example if the table has 8, 5, 6, 7 and you hold a Q you can take all 4 cards (8+5=6+7=13). If you can’t match anything you have to put one of your cards on the table. After 6 rounds the players don’t have cards and the next 6 cards are distributed to the players from the deck. Repeat until the deck is empty.

At the end, the last one that grabbed something from the table grab the rest of the cards from the table.

Counting points to see who won:

the following cards are worth 1 point: 10, Ace, J, Q, K
there are 2 special cards: 2 of clubs = 1 point and 10 of diamonds = 2 pts
The one that has more cards in his stack gets 3 extra points.
So, the total amount of points in the game is 25.
Also, every time a player clear the table of all cards he gets an extra point.

The first one to reach 101 points has won.

have fun !

This is such a great game, we have been playing it at my house for the last month with my Chinese roommate Ru and my Indian roommate Mandeep (we need to be 4) and we love it. We did play a lot with Ru’s friend Fong but she went back to north china… she was too good for us low level players anyway! I used to play this game with my family back in France and I figured, you know, we must have been playing the “French rules”. Well, we were actually pretty accurate although we had no clue of what some of the symbol really meant.

This is how a real nice old Chinese set of tiles looks like:
my parents’game (137k)