Machiavelli is the melding game in which the table belongs to nobody. As in Scala 40 you build runs and sets, but here anything already on the table can be taken apart and put back together by anyone, as long as the table is left tidy when the turn ends. It looks like a small difference on paper and it is an enormous one in play: turns become long puzzles in which a single card, slotted into the right place, can free five others. Anyone who calls it open rummy is describing the same game.
Decks and the deal
The game uses two fifty-two card French decks with their jokers, which comfortably covers two to five players; a bigger table adds a third deck. Each player is dealt thirteen cards and the rest stays face down in the middle as the stock. There is no discard pile and no final discard — the other big departure from Scala 40. On your turn you play everything you can manage to play, and if you can manage nothing at all you draw one card from the stock and the turn passes.
Melding and rearranging the table
The legal melds are the familiar ones: a run of at least three consecutive cards in one suit, and a set of at least three cards of the same rank in different suits. There is no minimum opening to reach, so you can start laying cards down on the very first turn with whatever combination you happen to hold. From that point every meld on the table is common property. On your turn you may split a run in two, move a card from a set into a run, pull a joker out of one meld and use it in another, and shuffle things around as much as you like. The one hard constraint is that the turn has to place at least one card from your own hand: the table is not rearranged for its own sake.
Leaving the table valid
When your turn ends, every group of cards on the table must be a legal meld — no orphan pairs, no two-card runs, no joker sitting on its own. This is the heart of the game and also its trap, because it is very easy to start moving cards convinced the arithmetic will work out and to notice halfway through that a piece is missing. Many groups play with a time limit of three or five minutes for exactly that reason.
When the puzzle does not come out
If you cannot finish the rearrangement, the table goes back exactly as you found it and you pay by drawing one card from the stock, which is the standard penalty. Some groups make it harsher at three cards, others soften it to simply losing the turn. Either way it pays to work the move out in your head before touching anything, or to say out loud that you are still thinking: once the table is in pieces, putting it back from memory is the problem of whoever took it apart.
Counting up at the end of a hand
The hand ends when a player places the last card from their hand. Everybody else counts what they are left holding: a joker is twenty-five points, an ace eleven, face cards ten and the rest their own number. The player who finished scores zero. As in Scala 40 the points are penalties and the best player is the one with fewest. There is no universally accepted limit: some groups play a fixed number of hands, five or ten, and others borrow Scala 40's 101 and knock out anyone who passes it. That is one more thing to settle before the deal.
Keeping score with Score Buddy
Score Buddy scores Machiavelli in reverse: the lowest total wins and the standings put the player with fewest points on top. There is no preset target, because the game has no shared one — the player cards show the number of turns played instead of a countdown, and the game lasts as long as you decide it does. At the end of a hand, tap each player and enter the points of the cards left in their hand; for whoever finished, type zero and confirm. The quick buttons +5, +10 and +25 match the low cards, the face cards and the joker, so a hand adds up in three or four taps. When you want to stop, the New game button files the game in your history and awards the win to the lowest score. If you would rather play to a knockout limit, the Free game is the only scorekeeper here whose target can be set by hand: pick your number and leave Lowest score selected.