Be the first to reach 40 points. You earn points by capturing cards from the table — matching by rank, sweeping the table clean (Limpias), and catching the AI dropping a card you just played (Caídas).
Cuarenta uses a 40-card Spanish deck — four suits (Oros, Copas, Espadas, Bastos), numbered 1–10. No face cards. Each player gets 5 cards per deal; the remaining cards form the stock pile.
On your turn, play one card from your hand. If the table has a card of the same rank, you capture it (and your played card). If multiple table cards match, you capture all of them. If no match exists, your card stays on the table.
If your capture clears every card from the table, that's a Limpia — worth 2 bonus points. Limpias are the fastest way to reach 40.
If the AI plays a card with the same rank as the card you just played, you score a Caída — worth 1 bonus point. Watch for patterns the AI drops into.
At the end of each deal: the player with more captured cards earns 1 point per card over 20. Plus Limpia bonuses (2 each) and Caída bonuses (1 each). First to 40 wins the match.
Cuarenta (meaning "Forty") is Ecuador's national card game — a fast-paced capture game played across South America for centuries. This browser version faithfully implements the full ruleset: rank matching, Limpias, Caídas, and multi-deal scoring to 40.
The AI adapts across 7 difficulty levels, from random play at Beginner to strategic capture-maximizing at Cyborg. The daily challenge seeds the same deck for all players worldwide.
The scoring vocabulary is half the charm — a Limpia for sweeping the table clean, a Caída for capturing the card your opponent just played — and the race to forty points keeps rounds brisk. It sits in the same capture family as Basra and Scopa, each culture tuning the same idea its own way.
Cuarenta is on this site because of what Cliko is for. I wanted this to be a place where people take a piece of their country and share it with everyone — and Ecuador's national card game is exactly that kind of piece. Forty cards, forty points, a game that fills Ecuadorian family gatherings and social clubs, and that almost nobody outside the country has ever had a decent online version of. Building it felt less like adding a game and more like welcoming a guest. It's also why multiplayer is coming next: a national game deserves to be shared across a real table, even a digital one, and this page is only half itself until then.
The game itself is a beautiful economy of three ways to score. You capture cards by matching rank — play a card, take every table card of the same rank at once. Clear the entire table with a capture and that's a Limpia, worth 2 bonus points. And if the AI drops a card matching the rank of the card you just played, you score a Caída for 1 more. At deal's end, the player with more captured cards earns a point for every card past twenty. First to forty wins the match. Three scoring channels, one shared table, five cards in hand at a time.
The beginner mistake is treating those channels as one: chasing any capture, at any time, as if a capture were automatically good. It isn't — the channels carry different prices. A reflexive capture that leaves one lonely card on the table hands your opponent a cheap Limpia setup on a plate. Playing a rank you've played recently invites a Caída pattern the AI will happily exploit — watch for its patterns, because I promise it watches for yours. And grinding out small captures while ignoring the card-count race can leave you winning the fireworks and losing the deal, since the quiet point-per-card-over-twenty column often outweighs a flashy bonus or two by the end.
So play the economy, not the reflex. Before each card, ask which channel it serves: does this capture push my card count forward? Does it set up a Limpia, or deny one? Does it walk into a Caída, or bait one out? The best plays serve two channels at once — a capture that fattens your pile AND sweeps the table clean is the Cuarenta dream. The worst plays serve none, and inform your opponent's next move for free.
The daily deal arrives at midnight, the same for every player. Learn the three-channel economy and you're playing the game Ecuador actually plays — and when multiplayer lands, you'll be ready to deal someone in. That's the whole idea.