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Keeping score at Machiavelli
Machiavelli can be played without recording anything at all: deal a hand, whoever runs out of cards wins it, shuffle again. Keeping score matters when you want a longer game made of several hands, and in that case you score it the way you score Scala 40 — the cards left in your hand when somebody goes out. The lowest total wins.
The usual values are face values: numbered cards count their number, face cards ten, an ace one or eleven depending on how you were using it, and a joker twenty-five. None of that is universal — Machiavelli is a house game, passed on by word of mouth far more than in writing — so agree on it before you deal.
Why going out early pays
What makes Machiavelli distinctive is that everything on the table can be rearranged: you may break up other people's runs, move cards between melds and rebuild them, so long as every group on the table is valid again by the end of your turn. That makes hands long and turns slow, and it means a hand can turn over completely at the last moment. Penalty scoring rewards the player who goes out early rather than the one building the perfect table — the longer you hold cards, the more likely you are to pay for all of them.
Using the scorer
There is no preset target, because the game has no traditional one. The standings are ranked lowest first, and the game ends when you decide it does, usually after a fixed number of hands or once someone passes a limit you agreed on. The five, ten and twenty-five quick buttons follow the card values.
Frequently asked questions
- Does Machiavelli need to be scored at all?
- Not necessarily. Plenty of people play single hands, where running out of cards is the whole win. The scorer is for when you want a multi-hand game with an overall winner.
- Does the highest or the lowest score win?
- The lowest. Cards left in hand are recorded as a penalty, so the standings are ordered the opposite way round from a game like Scopa.
- Why is there no target set?
- Because Machiavelli has no traditional one. Agree on a limit yourselves — a hundred or two hundred points are common choices — or play a fixed number of hands.
- What is a joker left in hand worth?
- Usually twenty-five points, as in Scala 40, but that is a convention rather than a fixed rule. Settle it before you start, along with the value of an ace.