Scopa uses a 40-card Italian deck with 4 suits — Coins (Denari), Cups (Coppe), Swords (Spade), and Clubs (Bastoni). Each suit has cards numbered 1–10 (where 8=Fante/Jack, 9=Cavallo/Horse, 10=Re/King). Each player receives 3 cards, and 4 cards are placed face-up on the table.
On your turn, play one card from your hand. If it matches the value of a table card, you capture both. If it matches the sum of multiple table cards, you can capture the whole group. If no capture is possible, your card stays on the table. When both hands are empty, 3 more cards are dealt — until the deck runs out.
If your capture takes every card from the table, that's a Scopa — worth 1 bonus point! Sweeping the table is the game's signature move and one of the most satisfying plays in all card games.
After all cards are played, points are awarded for: Cards (most captured = 1pt), Coins (most coin-suit cards = 1pt), Settebello (7 of Coins = 1pt), Primiera (highest prime value across all 4 suits = 1pt), plus 1pt per Scopa. First to 11 points wins the match!
For Primiera scoring, each card has a special value: 7 = 21, 6 = 18, Ace = 16, 5 = 15, 4 = 14, 3 = 13, 2 = 12, face cards = 10. You need at least one card in each suit to compete for Primiera.
Scopa (Italian for "broom" — as in sweeping the table clean) is Italy's most popular card game, played in homes, cafés, and piazzas for over 500 years. It's a fishing game where you match cards by value to capture them from the table. Simple to learn but deeply strategic — every capture decision affects your scoring in four different categories.
This version features 7 AI difficulty levels, a daily challenge with a shared deal for all players, and authentic Italian-style card rendering. Play free in your browser — no download, no sign-up needed.
The Settebello — the seven of coins — is the most contested card in the deck, worth a point all by itself, and chasing it warps every capture decision in the best way. Primiera scoring quietly rewards collecting sevens across the suits. Basra and Cuarenta show the same fishing-capture idea as it evolved in Egypt and Ecuador.
Scopa is the game that taught me the difference between capturing cards and capturing the right cards — and the interface of this build exists to teach you the same lesson faster than the game taught it to me.
Here's the design call at the centre of it. When you pick a card in your hand, the build highlights exactly which table cards it can capture, and the 7♦ — the Settebello — gets flagged distinctly wherever it appears on the felt. That's not decoration. Scopa's capture decision is layered: any given play might take one card or a combination, and buried inside those options is a scoring system that cares about very specific cards far more than others. The highlight surfaces the whole decision cleanly, so you're weighing choices instead of hunting for legal moves. And keeping the Settebello visually loud means the game's single most valuable card can never quietly slip past you into an opponent's pile while you were busy counting something else.
Because that's the mistake, and nearly everyone makes it: chasing raw card count. It feels right — more captures, more cards, more winning, surely. But Scopa scores on several axes at once, and cards are only one of them. There's the Primiera — the prime — which weighs the best card of each suit you've captured, and it loves 7s first and 6s second. There's the Settebello itself, a point on legs. There are the coins as a group, and there are the sweeps. A player can drag home the biggest pile of cards on the table and still lose the round soundly, because their opponent quietly collected the 7s, the coins, and the one card that matters most. I know this because I was that player, more than once, staring in confusion at my big useless pile.
So weight your captures by scoring value, not quantity. A 7 is worth fighting for even when the capture looks small; a 6 is next in line; a fat capture of face cards might be worth less than either one. When two legal captures are available, take the one that feeds Primiera or secures coins — and guard the Settebello with the paranoia it deserves, both taking it whenever you can and never, ever making a play that hands it away cheap.
Scopa came to me through the same research rabbit hole that brought Basra to this site, and of the Mediterranean fishing games it's the one with the deepest scoring. Learn to read a capture in layers — cards, coins, 7s, Settebello — and you'll beat players who've been grabbing the biggest pile their whole lives. The daily deal lands at midnight for everyone.