French Tarot Rules — How to Play and Keep Score

Overview

French Tarot uses a seventy-eight card tarot deck: four suits of fourteen, twenty-one numbered trumps and the Excuse. One player, the taker, plays alone against everyone else and has to reach a card-point target that depends on how many of the three most valuable cards they end up holding. Every deal is settled with a single formula and the whole table always sums to zero, which makes it a bidding sheet with a computed result rather than a game of tallied numbers.

Setup

Three, four or five players. Deal in packets of three: eighteen cards each with a six-card dog at four players, fifteen each with a three-card dog at five, twenty-four each with a six-card dog at three. Agree the session length before the first deal, since the winner is simply whoever has the best total at the end.

How to play

Bidding runs from Petite through Garde, Garde Sans le Chien and Garde Contre le Chien. On the two lower bids the taker takes the dog into hand and discards the same number of cards face down; on Garde Sans the dog counts for the taker untouched; on Garde Contre it counts for the defence. With five players the taker calls a king, and whoever holds it becomes their silent partner until that king appears.

Scoring

Cards are counted in pairs. A king or a bout counts 4.5, a queen 3.5, a knight 2.5, a jack 1.5 and every other card 0.5, giving 91 card points in the deck. The three bouts are the trump 1, the trump 21 and the Excuse.

The taker's target depends on how many bouts they finish with: three bouts needs 36, two needs 41, one needs 51 and none needs 56.

Take the difference between the taker's card points and their target, ignoring the sign, and add the base value of 25. Add or subtract the petit au bout bonus of 10 if that prize was won by the taker or by the defence. Multiply the result by the contract multiplier: Petite one, Garde two, Garde Sans four, Garde Contre six. Then add the poignée, which is 20 for a simple handful, 30 for a double and 40 for a triple, always going to the side that wins the deal and never multiplied. Finally apply any slam: 400 for one that was announced and made, 200 for one made without being announced, and minus 200 for an announcement that failed.

The whole figure is positive when the taker reached their target and negative when they did not. It is then settled per player. With three players the taker gains twice the figure and each defender loses it once. With four, the taker gains three times and each defender loses once. With five, the taker gains twice, the partner gains once, and each of the three defenders loses once. If the taker calls a king they hold themselves, they play alone and take four times the figure.

Ending the game

The session runs for the agreed number of deals and the highest total wins. Because every deal is zero-sum, the totals must always add up to zero, which is a useful check on the sheet.

Common variations

A poignée may be shown by any player, not only the taker. Some groups allow the Excuse to be led at any time, or pay a small bonus to a taker who wins a deal against a called king held by an opponent.