Origins

Truco is a popular card game played in #Brazil. Originally from the city of Valencia in Spain, the card game made its way to sunny plains and beaches of Brazil, where is played across the country and throughout its states.  It is said that the game was brought by European immigrants from Spain and Italy on their way to Brazil and other South American countries in the 17^th century.

Mechanics

The game itself has a lot of variations in how it can be played but if you simplify them, it will look like this:

First, get a deck of cards and 2 or 4 players. Then, shuffle the deck of cards and distribute 3 cards to each player, once you are finished, flip a card from the deck of cards. The card flipped will dictate what are the strongest cards in the game. For instance, if you flipped a five, the sixes are the strongest cards this round, with the club being the strongest suit and diamonds being the weakest. The strongest cards are also known as “Manilha”.

Outside of these cards, the strongest card is the number three, and the weakest one the number four, as long as they were not the ones that got flipped. The strength of the cards can be determined if you count from three and go backwards, so 3 -> 2 -> Ace -> Kings, Queen -> Jack and so on, until you arrive at 4. Each round has 3 turns, and a turn is completed once all players have played, alternating between teams. Every time you win a round, you get 1 point, or you may choose to call Truco, which will make the round be worth 3 points instead. However, ensure you either have strong cards in your or in your partner’s hand before you call Truco, or be good at bluffing that you have good cards, because if you lose, your opponent will receive 3 points instead. In addition to that, your opponent can double-on your Truco call, making the round be worth 6 points instead.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not quite.

Deceiving your opponents

While the game itself might sound simple on paper, there are a lot of mind games, trickery, and even cheating can get involved sometimes. Truco is often played among friends, families and random people you will meet, usually played at pubs and over drinks, and it’s quite common that someone will try to trick people or use elaborate bluffs to win in this game (at least in my neck of the woods). For example, sometimes people will have elaborate ways to shuffle a deck of card, so they can influence how cards are drawn, guaranteeing they will have strong cards such as a hand of 3s. Another common cheating practice is to remove strong cards from the deck and keep them hidden (such as in your sleeve or under your leg), so you can replace your bad cards with them.

Several times when playing with friends or people I have met at a pub or adjacent from my friend group, some form of mild cheating would happen as I described above. As mentioned, a very common strategy is to game the deck of cards, so you can draw exactly the cards you want. This form of cheating is so common that, many Truco tables implemented a strategy to counter it, it’s called ‘cut’ the deck. It works like this, you shuffle the deck of cards, then you give the deck to the person on your left to cut it, which they can ‘cut’ the deck in half, then halve it again, and place those halves in any order they want. This will often work, but good tricksters now how to counter it.

Outside of cheating, being good at signalling to your partner what cards you have without giving it away the information to your opponent can be critical to winning the game, a common way is to wink to your partner when you have “o gato” (The cat in Portuguese), which means the Club suit of the strongest card. In addition to that, another form of deceiving your opponents is through shouting and raising your voice. Think of birds and other animals trying to intimidate one another before a fight type of deal. For example, whenever someone calls Truco, it is common for then to raise their voice and say it loudly to intimidate their opponents. Or you can choose to be sneaky about it and say it calmly. The point is you are trying to play with the minds of your opponent, are you shouting or being calm because you have great set of cards, or is all an act?

Play variation

Now that I have explained the basic rules of the game and some of the culture around cheating and bluffing methods, I figured I would make things even more confusing for you, the reader. There are multitude of rules and play variations depending on what city, state and even country you are playing this game.

For example, in some regions, they will use a Spanish deck of cards, which was the one traditionally used for this game. However, it eventually got phased out by a regular deck of cards and it’s not used as much anymore in a lot of regions across the country, as the regular deck of cards is easier to find. Now-a-days, if you pull out a Spanish deck of cards instead of a regular one, people will look at you in horror and disbelief asking you where you even found it.Another interesting part of Truco is that some people will play with a different order of cards, a common example of this having the jack being stronger than the queen instead of the other way around. In some places, the 8s and 9s are included as part of the normal gameplay, in some places they are removed from the deck.

This essay gives an overview of the game Truco, one of the most popular card games you can play in Brazil. Perhaps I have managed to catch your interest in it, and you will give it a try whenever you get a chance to do so. If so, I recommend asking the people you are playing with how they play because there is a good chance that what you just read in this article doesn’t apply to the way they play. So, will you cheat or trick your way to victory?