🪜 Scala 40

In Scala 40 the score is a penalty rather than a reward: you record what is left in your hand when somebody goes out, and the winner is whoever has accumulated the least by the end. It is the exact reverse of Scopa, and it is the first thing to settle at the table, because players arriving from other games instinctively enter the points they melded rather than the ones they were caught holding.

Cards in hand are worth their face value: a three is three, a ten is ten, and every face card is ten. An ace counts one if you were holding it as the low end of an ace-two-three run, and eleven otherwise — which is the single most common argument at the end of a hand. A joker is worth twenty-five, which is why hanging on to one hoping for the right card is such an expensive habit.

The forty-point threshold

Opening is the rule the game is named after: you cannot lay anything down until the melds you put down in one go add up to at least forty points, counted by card value. Until you have opened you cannot add to anybody else's melds either. Hence the game's characteristic shape — a player who has not opened keeps accumulating cards, and if an opponent goes out quickly they are left holding a very expensive hand. A player who goes out with nothing left scores zero.

Using the scorer

The target is set to a hundred and one, and it is an elimination threshold rather than a winning one: the scorer ranks the lowest total first and shows how much room is left before the limit. The five, ten and twenty-five quick buttons follow the card values, twenty-five being exactly one joker caught in hand.