Play Cuarenta — Ecuador's national card game! Ecuador's own game on the Spanish 40-card deck. Capture by match, addition and sequence, take Caídas and Limpias, and race to 40 points.
Be the first to reach 40 points — the "cuarenta" the game is named for. Points come from three places: taking the card your opponent just played (a caída), sweeping the table clean (a limpia), and counting your captured cards at the end of each hand.
Cuarenta is Ecuador's national card game, played with the Spanish-suited 40-card deck — four suits (oros, copas, espadas, bastos) ranking A 2 3 4 5 6 7 J Q K, the last three being the sota, caballo and rey. There are no 8s, 9s or 10s. The deck is Spanish; the game is Ecuadorian. Each player gets 5 cards per deal and the rest form the stock — the table itself starts empty.
Play one card per turn. It can take cards three ways. Match: take one table card of the same rank. Addition: a numbered card (A–7) takes a set of numbered cards that adds up to it — play a 7 and collect a 3 and a 4 together. Sequence: after either capture, you also take the card ranking just above the card you played, and any unbroken run continuing upward. The ranking is A 2 3 4 5 6 7 J Q K, so that run carries on past the 7 into the J, Q and K — which is how one card can take three, four or five at a stroke. The run is measured from the card you played rather than the card you took, and it stops at the first missing rank: play a 7 onto a mesa of K J 6 3 5 A and the 6 and the A add up to 7 while the J follows on above it, but the K stays put because the Q that would link it is absent. Capturing is optional, and where more than one capture is legal you pick the one you want.
If your capture clears every card from the table, that's a Limpia — worth 2 points.
Match the card your opponent has just laid down and take it straight back off the table: a Caída, worth 2 points. A capture that is both a caída and a limpia is worth 4.
At the end of a hand the cards themselves pay: 20 captured cards score 6 points, and every extra card adds one more, rounded up to the next even number — 22 cards score 8, 24 score 10. Cards still lying on the table count for neither side. From 38 points a limpia no longer scores, so the last two points must come from cards or from a caída. First to 40 wins the match.
Cuarenta (meaning "forty") is the national card game of Ecuador, where it has been the game of family tables and social clubs for well over a century. It is played with the Spanish-suited 40-card deck — oros, copas, espadas, bastos, ranking A 2 3 4 5 6 7 J Q K, with no 8s, 9s or 10s. The deck is Spanish and the game is Ecuadorian; the two get confused often enough to be worth saying plainly. This version implements the full ruleset — all three captures (match, addition and sequence), caídas, limpias, the 38-point lock, and card counting at the end of every hand.
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 mesa clean, a caída for taking the card your opponent has just laid down, both worth 2 — and the race to forty 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. Cards come to you three ways too: match a rank and take that card; play a numbered card and take a set that adds up to it, a 7 collecting a 3 and a 4; and after either capture, keep climbing — the card ranking just above the one you played comes along, and anything in an unbroken run above that. Sweep the mesa completely and that's a Limpia, worth 2. Take the card your opponent has just laid down, right out from under them, and that's a Caída, worth 2 as well. Then at the end of the hand the cards themselves pay: twenty of them scores 6, and every extra card adds a point, rounded up to the next even number. First to forty wins. Three scoring channels, one shared mesa, 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. Every card you lay down is a card your opponent may match for a Caída, so think twice before dropping a rank they are likely to be holding — watch their patterns, because I promise the AI watches for yours. And grinding out small captures while ignoring the card-count race can leave you winning the fireworks and losing the deal: twenty cards is already 6 points, and the quiet column that pays a point per extra card 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.