Italy's favourite trick-taking duel: you never have to follow suit, so every card you play is a small bluff about what you are holding back.
One suit is turned up as the trump (briscola). Players hold three cards, play one each to a trick, then draw from the stock. You are free to play any card. The higher trump wins the trick; with no trump played, the higher card of the led suit wins. The winner takes both cards' points and leads next.
Briscola is one of the three games that carry Italian card play, alongside Scopa and Tressette, and it has changed remarkably little in the process.
It descends from Brusquembille, which makes it a relative of briscan and of bezique — the ace-ten trick-taking family, where a card's rank ignores the number printed on it: the three outranks the king, queen and jack, and is worth 10 points to the king's 4.
The traditional pack is not the one most players outside Italy will picture. A 40-card Italian deck is divided into coins, swords, cups and batons, running one to seven plus three face cards. An Anglo-French deck substitutes cleanly once the eights, nines and tens are removed.
Briscola is a traditional public-domain Italian trick-taking game. This is an original, free browser version with daily and practice deals, a tactical CPU and online head-to-head play.