• It uses a Tarot deck -- swords, cups, wands, pentacles, and the major trumps, for five suits total -- stripped (2 through 6 are extracted) and supplemented with special cards. (Remember trying to play Crazy Eights when you couldn't find a decent deck in the house and eventually you came up with a 47-card extravaganza that you supplemented by marking up the jokers? This feels like the sixteenth century equivalent.)
• Several cards are uniquely powerful. The matto, which loses to every other card, may be played to any trick regardless of whether or not you have any cards in the suit led. And it works like a yo-yo -- it is always retained by the side that played it. So if you contribute the matto to a trick and lose the trick, you may paw around in those you have captured and swap something out or even wait until you win a future trick.
• Hand signals are legal: volo (toss your card in the air when playing it) means "I am now out of these," busso (hit the table with your fist) asks partner "please play high and return the suit", and striscio (scrape the card on the table) means "please lead trumps". There used to be many more signals but the cheating got rampant and they were banned in the nineteenth century.
• Sequences are declared both at the beginning -- show them, then replace them in your hand -- and at the end (assembled from tricks taken). You need not show your entire sequence length up front (and given the negative inferences involved, there may be times when you wish not to).

Games are played in hands that are then totaled until someone reaches eight hundred (hence ottocento).

It adds up to a game that requires quite a while to internalize -- even reading the cards is a challenge, since none of them have numbers -- but that then opens up vistas of skill. As a British enthusiast puts it, "I have not played the game in Bologna, and it is probable that no one outside Bologna is a really skilled player of Ottocento." Web sites to learn more include:

• www.pagat.com/tarot/ottocen.html
• The Tarocco Bolognese official Web site

Now I have to hunt down a genuine deck and then find three other people interested in playing...

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ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith