Escoba del 15 Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

Escoba del 15 is the Spanish member of the fishing family. Cards on the table are captured by making them add up to exactly fifteen with one card from your hand. Clear the table completely and you have swept it, which is the escoba the game is named after and a point in itself. Deals are scored on four small categories plus sweeps, and the first to 21 wins.

Setup

Use a 40-card Spanish pack: ace through seven plus sota, caballo and rey in coins, cups, swords and clubs. If you only have a French pack, remove the eights, nines and tens.

Deal three cards to each player and four face up in the middle. When those three are exhausted, deal three more to everyone from the same pack without touching the table cards, until the pack is used up. With two players everyone gets thirteen cards over the deal, with four players everyone gets nine.

How to play

On your turn play one card face up. If it plus one or more table cards adds up to exactly fifteen, you capture all of them along with your own card and put them face down in your pile. If nothing sums to fifteen, your card simply stays on the table.

Capturing values are ace 1 through seven 7, then sota 8, caballo 9 and rey 10. If your capture takes the last card off the table you have scored an escoba, which you mark by leaving one card of the capture face up in your pile.

If the four cards dealt to the table at the start already total fifteen, the dealer takes them as an escoba.

When the pack and everyone's hands are empty, any cards still on the table go to whoever made the last capture. That is not an escoba.

Scoring

After every deal, four category points are awarded:

• Cards: to the side that captured more than twenty of the forty cards. Twenty each and nobody scores it.
• Coins: to the side with more than five of the ten coin cards. Five each and nobody scores it.
• Seven of coins: to whoever captured that exact card. This one can never be tied.
• Primera: to the side with the better primera. Take your highest-valued card in each of the four suits and add them using 7=21, 6=18, ace=16, 5=15, 4=14, 3=13, 2=12 and any court card=10. The maximum is 70. A side missing a suit entirely loses automatically; equal totals and nobody scores it.

Then add 1 point for every escoba either side made during the deal.

A deal therefore always hands out at most four category points, plus however many sweeps happened. Write each side's figure in its cell and add it to the running total.

Ending the game

Play deals until a side has 21 or more at the end of a deal. If both sides reach it in the same deal, the higher total wins; a genuine tie is broken by playing one more deal. The app records a genuine tie as a shared win, so raise the target in match settings to open that extra deal.

Common variations

Some regions score the seven of coins as two points, or drop the primera because comparing it slows the game down. Others count the seven of each suit as a separate minor category. Playing to 30 or 40 suits a long evening.