Scopa Rules

Capture cards off the table, and capture the right ones. At the end of every round four points are on offer (most cards, most coins, the seven of coins, and the best primiera), plus a point for every time you swept the table bare. First to 11 wins.

Scopa is simply the Italian for broom. The game is named after the move that clears the table.

Scopa is played with a 40-card Italian deck, not the 52-card deck the rest of this site uses. Four suits, ten cards each, no 8/9/10 pip cards and no jokers:

• Coppe (cups)
• Denari (coins)
• Spade (swords)
• Bastoni (clubs, or batons)

Within a suit the cards run 1 to 7 and then three court cards, and for every purpose in Scopa a card is worth its number:

Card	Counts as
Asso (ace) through 7	1 – 7, face value
Fante (knave)	8
Cavallo (knight)	9
Re (king)	10

There is no trump suit and no ranking of one suit over another. A 6 of cups and a 6 of swords are the same thing to a capture; the suits matter only when the round is scored.

And the three court cards, here in coins. The same three figures appear in every suit:

Card images: a Neapolitan deck, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons (uploader Trocche100, released into the public domain; retrieved 2026-09-21). Attribution isn't required by the licence. It's here because knowing where a picture came from is worth more than the licence asks.

Decks differ by region. A Neapolitan deck (pictured) and a Piacentine deck carry the same forty cards in different artwork; some Tuscan decks put a Donna (queen) where the Cavallo sits. The game is the same. A 52-card deck also works if you take out the 8s, 9s and 10s and read jack–queen–king as 8–9–10.

• Two to four players. Two head to head is the classic game; four is played in fixed partnerships, sitting across from your partner. Three play as individuals.
• The dealer gives three cards to each player, face down, and lays four cards face up in the middle of the table.
• When everybody has played out their three cards, the dealer deals three more each from the stock, and no more cards go to the table. That repeats until the deck is gone, which ends the round.
• A common courtesy rule: if three or more kings land face up on the opening table, the deal is void and the whole hand is dealt again. Three kings on the table is close to unplayable, since only a king can take a king.

The turn passes one seat at a time around the table, starting with the player to the dealer's right.

On your turn you play one card from your hand, face up. One of two things happens:

1. It captures. Your card takes one table card of the same value, or a set of table cards whose values add up to yours. Everything captured, plus the card you played, goes face down in front of you in your own pile.
2. It doesn't. The card you played stays on the table, face up, for everybody else to capture. That's not a penalty; it's half the game.

Worked through: the table shows 3, 4, 5 and a Re (10). Play a 4 and you take the 4. Play a Fante (8) and you take the 3 and the 5. Play a 7 and you take the 3 and the 4. Play a Cavallo (9) and you take nothing, and the 9 sits down on the table beside the rest.

Most tables also play that you must capture if you legally can, rather than choosing to lay a card down instead.

If your capture takes the last cards off the table and leaves it completely bare, that's a scopa, and it's worth one point on its own, on top of everything else you score at the end of the round. The usual way to remember it is to lay the card you played face up and sideways in your pile, so the scope can be counted when the round is scored.

The exception: clearing the table with the very last card of the very last hand of a round is not a scopa. The table empties at the end of every round anyway (see below), so that one doesn't count.

When the deck is finished and everybody's hands are empty, any cards still sitting on the table go to whoever made the last capture. They're worth counting towards cards and coins, but taking them is not a scopa.

Everybody turns their pile over and counts. There are four points on offer, one each, plus the scope:

Point	Goes to
Carte (cards)	Whoever captured the most cards; 21 of the 40 does it
Denari (coins)	Whoever captured the most cards of the coins suit; 6 of the 10
Sette bello	Whoever captured the seven of coins. One card, one point, every round
Primiera (the prime)	Whoever has the best four-card prime; see below
Scope	One point for each sweep you made during the round

A tie scores nobody. If two players capture twenty cards each, neither gets the point for cards; same for coins and for primiera.

The primiera

The fiddly one, and worth reading twice. Take your best card in each of the four suits, convert each to its primiera value from the table below, and add the four together. Highest total takes the point.

Card	Primiera value
7	21
6	18
Asso (ace)	16
5	15
4	14
3	13
2	12
Fante, Cavallo, Re	10 each

Note what that order does: a 7 beats a 6, and a 6 beats an ace, and the three court cards are the worst cards in the prime despite being the biggest for capturing. That's why the sevens are fought over all round, and why the seven of coins is the single most valuable card in the deck: it's a point by itself, it's the best card in the suit that scores, and it's the best card in the prime.

Rounds are dealt and scored until somebody reaches 11 points. Some tables play to 16 or 21 for a longer game; agree it before the first deal. If two players cross the line in the same round, the higher total wins; level at the top, and you deal another round.

Scopa has a large family. These are the names that come up most, mentioned here only so they're recognisable, though none of them is described in full on this page:

• Scopone: the serious four-handed partnership game; every card is dealt at the start and nothing is held back.
• Scopa d'Assi, also called Asso piglia tutto ("the ace takes everything"): playing an ace sweeps the whole table.
• Scopa di Quindici: you capture cards that add with yours to fifteen, rather than matching your card's value.
• Napola (or Napoli): bonus points for holding a run of coins starting at the ace.
• Cirulla: the Ligurian game, with hand bonuses on top of everything above.

Which, if any, of these NewfieCards would deal is exactly the kind of thing that gets decided at a kitchen table and not by a coder.