Tarot card games

Tarot card games are card games played with tarot decks. The basic rules first appeared in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona, written before 1425. The games, known as "tarot", "tarock", "tarocco" and other spellings, are known in many variations, mostly cultural and regional.

The deck which English-speakers call by the French name Tarot is called Tarocco in Italian, Tarock in German and various similar words in other languages. Tarot games originated in Italy, and spread to most parts of Europe, notable exceptions being the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and the Balkans. They are played with decks having four ordinary suits, and one additional, longer suit of tarots, which are always trumps. They are characterised by the rule that a player who cannot follow to a trick with a card of the suit led must play a trump to the trick if possible. Tarot games may have introduced the concept of trumps to card games. More recent tarot games borrowed features from other games like bidding from Ombre and winning the last trick with the lowest trump from Trappola.

Tarot decks did not precede decks having four suits of the same length, and they were invented not for occult purposes but purely for gaming. Only later were they used for cartomancy and divination, and also as a field for artists to display specific iconographies, often connected to some ideological system. Concrete forms appear at least since the article by Court de Gébelin in the year 1781.

Tarocco (Italian, plural Tarocchi), and similar names in other languages, is a specific form of playing card deck used for different trick-taking games. An earlier name of the game Trionfi is first recorded in the diary of Giusto Giusti in September 1440 (in other early documents also ludus triumphorum or similar ). The name Tarochi was first used in Ferrara June 1505, the name Taraux appeared in Avignon in December of the same year. The names Tarocco, Tarocchi and Tarot developed in later times beside different writing forms. The poet Francesco Berni still mocked on this word in his Capitolo del Gioco della Primiera written in 1526. The name Trionfi developed later as a general term for trick-taking games (Triomphe in French, Trumpfen in German and Trump in English), although it has almost completely disappeared in its original function as deck name. Other different games claimed the name without any use of Tarocchi cards. The first basic rules for the game of Tarocco appear in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona, the next are known from the year 1637.

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