Scopa Card Game Rules

Scopa is one of Italy’s best-known card games, a “fishing” game in which you play a card from your hand to capture cards of the same value from the table. Its name means “broom”: clear every card off the table and you have made a scopa, a sweep, worth a point. Along with Briscola and Tressette it is one of Italy’s three great national card games, and Italian emigrants took it to Argentina, Brazil and beyond. It is usually played by two players, or four in two teams, with a 40-card Italian deck, but an ordinary deck works too. This guide covers the Scopa card game rules: the cards, capturing, scoring, the primiera, variations, tips and odds.

Scopa Rules at a Glance

The Cards: Italian Deck or Regular Deck

Scopa uses a 40-card Italian deck with four suits: coins (denari), cups (coppe), swords (spade) and clubs (bastoni). Each suit runs Ace to 7 plus three face cards: the Jack (Fante, worth 8), the Horse (Cavallo, 9; a Queen in northern Italian decks) and the King (Re, 10). Coins are the important suit, and the seven of coins, the settebello or “beautiful seven”, is the most valuable card in the game.

No Italian cards? Use a regular deck. Take out the 8s, 9s and 10s to leave 40 cards. The Jack counts 8, the Queen 9 and the King 10, and diamonds stand in for coins, so the seven of diamonds is the settebello. Some beginners instead take out the face cards and play Ace to 10.

How to Deal

1. Shuffle and deal three cards to each player, one at a time.
2. Deal four cards face up on the table. Many players lay them in a square.
3. Three or four Kings face up? Collect the cards and deal again, because nobody could ever sweep that table. It is rare: 0.16% of deals, about 1 in 630.
4. Keep the rest face down. When everyone has played their three cards, the dealer deals three more to each player, but never any more to the table. With two players there are six deals of three cards in a hand.

How to Play Scopa

The player beside the dealer starts (the non-dealer in a two-player game), and play goes around the table, traditionally to the right. On your turn you play one card face up from your hand:

• Capture an equal card. If a card on the table has the same value as yours, you take it, together with the card you played, and put them face down in your pile.
• Or capture a sum. If no single card matches, you can take two or more cards that add up to your card: a Horse (9) can take a 4 and a 5.
• A single card comes first. If your card matches a single card and a set, you must take the single card. A 5 on a table with A, 4 and 5 takes only the 5.
• You must capture if your card can. You cannot lay down a card that captures just to keep it on the table, but you can choose to play a different card that captures nothing.
• Nothing to capture? Your card stays face up on the table, where anyone can capture it later.

Making a Scopa

If your capture clears every card from the table, that is a scopa, worth 1 point. Players mark it by leaving the capturing card face up and sideways in their pile. The next player then has nothing to capture and must start a new table. The one exception: taking the last cards with the very last card of the hand never counts as a scopa.

When all the cards have been played, whoever made the last capture takes any cards still on the table. Then the hand is scored.

Scopa Scoring

At the end of each hand, players (or teams) score:

Ties score nothing: if both sides take 20 cards, nobody gets the point for cards.

The primiera takes its name from the old gambling game Primiera. Each side picks its best card in each suit and adds up their primiera values: 7 = 21, 6 = 18, Ace = 16, 5 = 15, 4 = 14, 3 = 13, 2 = 12, and face cards 10. The higher total wins the point, and a side missing a suit cannot score it. Sevens matter most, but not alone: three sevens with no card of the fourth suit make only 63, which loses to one seven and three Aces (69).

Winning the Game

Hands are dealt in turn until a player or team reaches 11 points with more than anyone else. Points only count at the end of a hand, so taking the settebello at 10–9 does not win on the spot. Many groups play to 16 or 21 instead, and some let a player end the hand early by claiming they have enough to win, at the risk of losing the game if they are wrong.

Scopa Variations

Scopa Strategy Tips

• Take the sweep. A scopa is a full point, as much as the settebello.
• Go after coins, sevens, sixes and Aces. They win the coins, settebello and primiera points. When you have a choice of sets, take the one with these cards in it.
• Do not leave the table at 10 or less. If you cannot capture, avoid playing a card that leaves the table adding up to 10 or under: your opponent can sweep it with a single card.
• Keep track of the sevens and the coins played. Knowing what is left tells you which cards are safe to lay down.

The tips are simple, but they make a big difference: in 10,000 simulated two-player games to 11, a player following them beat a player choosing at random 93% of the time.

Scopa Odds

• Sweeps: when both players follow the tips, a two-player hand produces 1.2 scope on average, against 0.5 when both play at random.
• Points per hand: about 4.9 between the two players, so a game to 11 takes a median of 4 hands.
• A tie on cards (20 each, so nobody scores that point) happens in 8% of hands.
• Dealing hardly matters: with both players following the tips, the dealer outscored the non-dealer in 44% of hands and the non-dealer won 44%; the rest were level.

The redeal figure is exact. The rest come from 40,000 simulated hands for each kind of play, under the rules above.

Where Scopa Comes From

Scopa was especially popular in Naples in the 18th century and was already played across Italy. It is thought to descend from Spanish games played in the port of Naples, and the primiera it scores is named after the old gambling game Primiera. Italian emigrants spread it widely, and it is still played in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Tunisia and Somalia, often under local names.

More Card Games

If you enjoy Scopa, try Sheepshead or Pinochle, two more classic European card games, or Cribbage, another game where you count card values as you play. For a casino card game, see baccarat.

Italy’s other classic: Briscola, a trick-taking game with the same 40-card deck, where Aces and Threes carry the points.

The English cousin: Casino, a fishing game played with a full 52-card deck, where you can also build cards to capture later.

Scopa: frequently asked questions