Trappola

Trappola

Trappola cards produced in Vienna, Austria, by the card-manufacture Ferdinand Piatnik & Sons.
Origin	Italy
Family	Trick-taking
Players	2–4
Skills required	Strategy
Cards	36
Deck	Trappola deck / German deck
Play	Clockwise
Playing time	25 min.
Random chance	Medium

Trappola is an early 16th-century Venetian trick-taking card game which spread to most parts of Central Europe and survived, in various forms and under various names like Trapulka, Bulka and Hundertspiel until perhaps the middle of the 20th century. It was played with a special pack of Italian-suited cards derived from the Venetian pattern, and last reported to have been manufactured in Prague in 1944.Piatnik has reprinted their old Trappola deck for collectors.

Trappola is an Italian word, which means "trap", mouse trap, cheat, fraud, and with respect to the derivation of the word, Peignot observes that Trappola means an ingenious thing, that is, something which deceives. The earliest version of the game was played without trumps. It is also the earliest known trick-taking game where the ace has been promoted above the king and played with a stripped deck.

Trappola was described by Cardano in his Liber de Ludo Aleae, written in 1564, as a popular Venetian game in the 16th century. It was a very popular card game in Venice in the early 16th century, but somehow appears to have lost its appeal in the area by the end of that century and moved northwards, most probably because of trading and troop movements.

Garzoni calls it the common game, and Tarocco the new invention, quoting the authority of Volaterano. However it is known that Tarocco was once called Trionfi and dates to at least 1440. It is clear that throughout the 17th to 19th centuries the game of Trappola was very popular over a wide area stretching from Nürnberg and Leipzig to Graz and Budapest. Other forms of Trappola, like Špady and Šestadevacet, were popular in the Czechoslovakia before World War II when the last Trappola cards were produced. Trappola is likely to be the first card game encountered by Greeks as the Greek word for playing card is "Τράπουλα", is a transliteration of Trappola. It may have entered into the Greek language from the Venetian-occupied Ionian Islands during the 16th century. In Corfu, Aspioti-ELKA produced Venetian pattern cards until 1940.