Burraco rules and scala 40 rules: how to play and scoring

In Italy it is hard to find a home with a standard French-suited deck where one of these two games has never been played. They are cousins: both come from the big rummy family (in Italian, ramino), both use the same 108-card pack, and both are about drawing, laying down runs and sets, and discarding. But the logic is the opposite. In burraco you play with a partner to pile up points on the table, and building long melds is what counts. In scala 40 each player is alone and the aim is to go out before everyone else, because whatever is left in your hand is a penalty.

Below you will find how to play burraco and how to play scala 40, one after the other, with the Italian terms you will hear at any table (pozzetto, pinella, matta, apertura, chiusura), the scoring in tables, what changes between the official rules and house rules, and a final table so you do not mix them up with canasta or with continental, their best-known relatives in Spain.

What you need for both games

The kit is identical: two complete 52-card French-suited decks, each with its two jokers. That makes 108 cards: 104 natural cards and 4 jokers. In Italy you can buy double packs made for this (sold as «mazzi da ramino» or «carte da burraco»), but two ordinary poker decks work just as well, as long as they are the same size and have the same back so they cannot be told apart when you draw. You can see how a standard deck is made up in our guide on how many cards are in a deck.

104 natural cards (every card appears twice) + 4 jokers = 108 cards

Since every card appears twice, it is normal in these games to hold two identical seven of hearts. That has consequences for the rules, as you will see: burraco lets you put identical cards in the same set, and scala 40 does not.

Burraco rules: how to play

Origins: from the River Plate to Italy

Burraco is a relative of canasta that was born in South America, most likely in Uruguay, in the 1940s, a few years after canasta was invented in Montevideo. The name is usually linked to the word buraco, «hole», although sources disagree on whether it comes from Portuguese or from River Plate Spanish. Brazil still plays its own version, buraco, and Argentina has burako, which is played with tiles instead of cards.

It reached Italy in the 1980s, first in the south, and in the 1990s it became a national craze. At first it was played in homes and bars with rules passed on by word of mouth, which differed from one region to the next. The Federazione Italiana Burraco (FIBUR), founded in 1994, organised tournaments and published a common rulebook that is now the reference. There are other federations with their own codes, and it is worth knowing that CONI (the Italian Olympic Committee) does not recognise burraco as a sport: among card games, only bridge has that status.

Players, the deal and the pozzetti

The classic form is four players in two partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other. It is also played by two and by three (the variants are further down). Under the FIBUR rules, the deal works like this:

1. The dealer shuffles and cuts by lifting roughly half the pack. The top part goes to the player on their right.
2. The dealer deals 11 cards to each player, one at a time and clockwise.
3. At the same time, the player on the dealer's right uses the cards they were handed to make two pozzetti of 11 cards each, placed face down. They are two reserve hands: one for each partnership.
4. The remaining cards form the stock, the tallone. The top card is turned up to start the discard pile (monte degli scarti), and play begins.

At home the pozzetti are often placed crosswise in the middle of the table. In tournaments they are stacked under the score sheet. The idea is the same: the first player in each partnership to run out of cards picks up a pozzetto and carries on playing with it.

The turn

Each turn has three steps:

1. Draw: either the top card of the stock or the whole discard pile. There is no middle ground: if you take from the pile, you take all of it. You do not need to meld anything to pick it up, and the pile never «freezes», unlike in canasta.
2. Meld new combinations or add cards (legare, «to tie on») to your partnership's melds. This is optional, and there is no minimum score for your first meld.
3. Discard one card face up. The discard ends your turn.

One rule that surprises players coming from other games: if the discard pile holds a single card and you take it, you cannot discard it again in the same turn, unless you show that you hold another identical card.

Valid melds

There are only two kinds of meld, and both need at least three cards:

• Run (sequenza or scala): three or more consecutive cards of the same suit. The ace can go below the 2 or above the king, but not at both ends at once. A run can hold up to 13 natural cards plus one wild card, so 14 cards.
• Set (combinazione): three or more cards of the same rank. Because there are two decks, a set can include repeated cards of the same suit. The maximum is 8 natural cards plus one wild: 9 cards.

Two details worth keeping in mind: a partnership cannot have two sets of the same rank on the table (if you already have a set of jacks, any new jack goes on that set), whereas it can have two different runs in the same suit. And once melded, runs cannot be joined or split.

Wild cards: the joker and the pinella

Burraco has 12 wild cards, called matte in Italian: the 4 jokers (jolly) and the 8 twos, which are called pinelle. Italian burraco decks usually mark the 2 with a special symbol so it can be spotted at a glance. The rules for using them are few but strict:

• No more than one wild card in each meld, whether joker or pinella.
• You cannot meld a combination made only of wild cards.
• A pinella of the same suit as the run can act as a natural 2 (in an ace, 2, 3 of spades run, the 2 of spades counts as an ordinary card). In that case the run can also take another wild card.
• A wild card never goes back to your hand. In a run it can give up its place to the natural card it stands for, but it stays in the same meld, moved to another position.

The burraco: pulito, semipulito and sporco

A burraco is any meld (run or set) of seven cards or more. It is the piece that brings the big points, and without at least one you cannot go out. There are three types:

• Burraco pulito (clean): no wild card at all. The only exception is a pinella acting as a natural 2 in its own suit, which does not make it dirty.
• Burraco sporco (dirty): contains a joker or a pinella used as a wild card.
• Burraco semipulito (semi-clean): a run where the wild card sits at one end and there are at least seven consecutive natural cards, or an eight-card set where one card is wild. It is part of the FIBUR rules; some home tables do not use it.

A burraco pulito that gets a wild card added becomes sporco and loses value, so think twice before «dirtying» a meld that is already complete. In tournaments, burraco melds are marked by turning cards crosswise: the last two for a pulito, the second to last for a semipulito and the last one for a sporco.

The pozzetto: how you pick it up

The pozzetto is what makes burraco unique. When a player runs out of cards for the first time in their partnership, they pick up one of the two pozzetti and carry on with those 11 new cards. Each partnership is entitled to one only. There are two ways to get there:

If the hand ends and a partnership has not managed to pick up its pozzetto, it pays a penalty (you will see it in the scoring table). That is why the game has two phases: first, the race to the pozzetto; then, building burraco melds and looking to go out.

How to go out (the chiusura)

A partnership can close the hand only if it meets three conditions at once:

1. It has already picked up its pozzetto.
2. It has at least one burraco on the table (pulito, semipulito or sporco).
3. One of the partners plays all their cards ending with a discard, and that last discard cannot be a wild card.

You cannot go out by melding all your cards without discarding. If your partnership already has its pozzetto but no burraco yet, you cannot run out of cards: you must keep at least two in hand so you can carry on. It is enough for one of the two partners to go out.

A hand can also end without anyone going out: when only two cards are left in the stock (they are not played), or through deadlock (stallo), when all four players just take the card from the pile and throw another back without ever drawing from the stock. In those cases nobody earns the bonus for going out.

Burraco scoring

At the end of the hand, each partnership adds up the value of the cards it has melded on the table, adds the bonuses and subtracts the value of the cards left in hand. The values are the same in the FIBUR rules and in the most common house rules:

If neither partnership has picked up its pozzetto, the penalty applies to nobody. A partnership's score can be negative. In casual play the usual target is for one partnership to pass 2,000 points (in Italy they say «a 2.005»); for shorter games, targets of 1,005 or 505 are used.

Burraco variants

FIBUR rules versus house rules

The federation rules are designed for tournaments and add a lot of procedure (how to shuffle, how the pozzetto is handed over, time per turn, penalties for exposing cards). Nobody plays like that at home, but there are real differences that do change the game:

Besides FIBUR there are other federations and associations with their own codes, and some offer their own game formats. If you are going to play at an Italian club, ask first which rules they use.

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Scala 40 rules: how to play

Origins

Scala 40 (also scala quaranta) is a rummy variant that in Italy ended up displacing traditional ramino, from which it inherited almost all its rules, until it became a game in its own right. Its name comes from its most distinctive rule: the first meld must be worth at least 40 points. There is no documented date of creation. Italian references place its spread across the country in the interwar years, and it is often said to come from Hungary, a theory nobody has been able to prove. Since 2010 there has been a Federazione Italiana Scala 40 (FISCA), based in Rome, which publishes the official rules and organises tournaments.

Players and the deal

It is played by 2 to 6 players, each on their own. With the same 108-card pack, the dealer shuffles, has the player on their right cut and deals 13 cards to each player, one at a time and clockwise. Then they turn up a card to start the discard pile (which in scala 40 is called the pozzo, not to be confused with the burraco pozzetto) and leave the rest in the middle as the stock (tallone). The player after the dealer starts, and the deal rotates.

Valid melds

• Run (scala or sequenza): three or more consecutive cards of the same suit, up to a maximum of 13 plus the joker. The ace can go below the 2 (ace, 2, 3) or above the king (queen, king, ace), but you cannot go round the corner: king, ace, 2 is not valid. You may meld a run identical to one already on the table.
• Set (tris or poker, also combinazione): three or four cards of the same rank and of different suits. Repeating a suit is not allowed here: three nines with two spades do not make a set. That is why a set never goes beyond four cards.

No card can belong to two melds at once, and you cannot meld combinations made only of jokers.

The joker in scala 40

Here only the joker is wild. The 2 is an ordinary card worth 2 points and can only act as a 2 (for example in ace, 2, 3 or in 2, 3, 4). The joker rules are these:

• Only one joker per meld.
• Within a meld it is worth whatever card it replaces. If it is not obvious which one (for example in a set of three with two sevens and a joker), you have to declare it.
• A player who has already opened can swap a joker on the table for the natural card it represents. Under the FISCA rules, the recovered joker must be used in that same turn in a new meld or laid off on another meld on the table; many home tables let you keep it in your hand.
• Left in your hand at the end, the joker is the costliest card: 25 points.

The opening: 40 points in one go

The rule that gives the game its name: to lay down your first meld you must, in that same turn, meld new combinations worth 40 points or more. Until you open you cannot lay off cards on other players' melds or take from the discard pile. Once you have opened, later melds can be worth any amount.

When counting the opening, number cards are worth their face value, picture cards 10, the ace 11 if it is high (queen, king, ace) or in a set of aces and 1 if it is low (ace, 2, 3), and the joker is worth the card it replaces. A few examples:

The turn and the discard pile

1. Draw a card. If you have not opened, only from the stock. If you have opened, from the stock or the top card of the discard pile (that card only, never the whole pile).
2. Meld or lay off if you can and want to (laying off on your own or other players' melds only after opening).
3. Discard a card, which ends your turn.

Taking from the pile comes with conditions: you must use the card you pick up in that same turn in a meld or by laying it off, and you cannot discard it again (unless you hold an identical one and declare it). Also, you cannot discard a card that «fits», that is, one that could be added to a meld on the table. Under the FISCA rules, in games with more than two players this ban is absolute, while head to head it only applies to a player who has already opened; the only exception is the discard you go out with. This is one of the rules that varies most from house to house.

If the stock runs out without anyone going out, the discard pile is shuffled (except the top card, which remains as the pile) and used as a new stock.

How to go out

Going out (chiudere) means getting rid of all your cards, and you must always finish by discarding the last one: melding everything and having nothing left to throw does not count. If that happens, you have to take back what you melded and redo the play. You also cannot go out on the first round: every player must have had at least one turn.

The showiest way is the chiusura in mano (going out from the hand): melding all 13 cards in a single turn, without having opened before, and discarding the last one. In that case you do not need to have reached the 40-point opening, because you open and go out at the same time. How it is rewarded depends on the rules you use (see the variants).

Scala 40 scoring

When someone goes out, that player scores 0 points for the hand and the others add against themselves the value of the cards left in their hand:

Points build up hand after hand. A player who reaches or passes the elimination score, usually 101 points (or 201 if agreed before starting), is out. Hands keep being played until only one player is left below the limit, and that player wins.

Scala 40 variants

The FISCA rulebook itself lists three official variants, and more circulate in homes. The sensible thing is to decide which ones apply before dealing:

Burraco vs scala 40, canasta and continental: the differences

All four games use two decks with jokers and are based on drawing, melding and discarding, so it is easy to mix up the rules. This table sums up what sets them apart. Canasta and continental each have their own guide on our site: canasta rules and continental rules.

An easy way to remember it: burraco is a canasta that allows runs and hides a second hand in the pozzetto; scala 40 is an elimination rummy with an entry fee. If you want to see where each one fits in the family of rummy games (alongside chinchón, a Spanish rummy game, or gin rummy, for example), it is all in our list of card games by type.

Basic strategy

In burraco

• Make the pozzetto your priority. Early in the hand it pays to empty your hand quickly to pick it up: that is 11 new cards and you avoid the penalty. Melding short combinations early helps you get there sooner.
• The discard pile cuts both ways. Taking a big pile gives you plenty of cards to build with, but it also pushes back the moment you run out. Take the pile when it helps you form melds, not just to stockpile.
• Do not dirty what could be pulito. A burraco pulito is worth twice a sporco. If a run of six clean cards can be completed with a natural card, wait before adding the joker.
• Watch what you discard. A card that fits an opponent's meld can hand them a burraco. Keep an eye on what the other partnership picks up.
• Do the maths before going out. If you are behind and your opponents hold a lot of cards, going out quickly penalises them. If you are ahead with a full table, it sometimes pays to keep going and make another burraco.

In scala 40

• Get rid of high cards early if they do not fit: a lone ace or a picture card weighs heavily if someone else goes out.
• Do not wait too long to open. Holding your hand for a big opening is tempting, but a player who has not opened can end up paying a lot (or a flat 100, depending on the rule).
• Jokers belong on the table, not in your hand. They cost 25 points if you are caught with them.
• Count the discards. Since every card exists twice, knowing whether both copies of a card are already out tells you whether a run or a set can still be made.
• Beware of being left with two cards. Since you must go out with a discard, with two loose cards in hand you need to lay off one and throw the other.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between burraco and scala 40?

Burraco is played in partnerships, with 11 cards, the 2 and the joker as wild cards and the aim of scoring points by building seven-card melds. Scala 40 is played individually, with 13 cards, only the joker is wild, the first meld must be worth 40 and you lose when you reach 101 penalty points.

How many decks do you need?

For both games, two 52-card French-suited decks with their jokers: 108 cards in total, including 4 jokers. Six-player burraco needs three decks.

What is the pinella in burraco?

It is the 2. It works as a wild card, just like the joker, and is worth 20 points. If it sits in a run of its own suit in the place of the 2, it counts as a natural card and does not make the burraco dirty.

How much is a burraco pulito worth?

200 points, plus the value of its cards. A sporco is worth 100 and a semipulito, under the FIBUR rules, 150.

Can you go out in burraco without picking up the pozzetto?

No. To go out you must have picked up the pozzetto, have at least one burraco and finish with a discard that is neither a joker nor a pinella. A partnership that has not picked up its pozzetto by the end of the hand loses 100 points.

How many points do I need to open in scala 40?

At least 40 in new melds laid down in the same turn. The ace is worth 11 high and 1 low, picture cards 10 and the joker whatever card it replaces.

What happens in scala 40 if someone goes out and I have not opened?

Under the official rules, you add the value of all your cards against yourself. Many homes apply the flat 100-point rule for anyone who has not opened, and with a chiusura in mano the penalty can be doubled.

Can burraco be played by two or three players?

Yes. Two players play just like partnerships, with one pozzetto each. With three, there is an 18-card pozzetto for the first player to empty their hand, who then plays alone against the other two.

Both games call for two identical, easy-to-handle decks, because you shuffle a 108-card pack and hold a lot of cards at once in every hand. If you are looking for a pair to get started, our playing cards section has poker models with their jokers that work for burraco, scala 40, canasta or continental.

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Keep exploring

• Canasta rules: complete guide with scoring and strategy
• Continental rules: the 7 contracts, buying and scoring
• Gin rummy rules: knock, gin, undercut and strategy
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