Cuarenta

Cuarenta uses a 40-card deck — an ordinary poker deck (♥ ♦ ♣ ♠) with the 8s, 9s and 10s removed (ranks: A, 2–7, J, Q, K). First player to reach 40 points wins.

1. Setup: 5 cards are placed face-up on the table. Each player receives 10 cards.
2. Your turn: Click a card in your hand to select it, then click Play Card (or click the table area). Green highlights show which table cards you'd capture.
3. Captures:
   • Sequence: if your card + 2 or more consecutive table cards form a run of 3+, you capture them all. Rank order: A–2–3–4–5–6–7–J–Q–K (7 and J are adjacent — the 8s, 9s and 10s aren't in play).
   • Pair: if your card matches the rank of any table card(s), you capture all matching cards.
   • Sequences take priority over pairs.
4. No capture: if neither applies, your card is added to the table.
5. Caída +1 bonus: if you capture right after your opponent captured, playing the same rank they played — that's a Caída!
6. Table cleared +1 bonus: clearing all cards from the table earns one bonus point.
7. Scoring per round:
   • Each Ace (A) captured: 1 pt (max 4)
   • 7 of Diamonds (7♦): 1 pt
   • Jack of Diamonds (J♦): 1 pt
   • Each table clear: 1 pt
   • Most cards captured: 1 pt (tie = 0)
8. When both hands are empty, deal 10 more cards each. When the deck runs out, score the round and begin a new one. First to 40 pts total wins.

Cuarenta is Ecuador's national card game, played enthusiastically across the country from Quito's urban cafés to rural communities in the Sierra and Costa. The name simply means "forty" — the target score and the deck size, both rolled into one. It is the card game Ecuadorians grow up with, the one played at family gatherings, political meetings, and long afternoons in any tienda with a deck of Spanish cards.

The game is played with a cheap poker deck stripped of its 8s, 9s and 10s — and those removed cards do double duty as the scorekeeper's tools: a face-up card on the table is a tanto worth 2 points, and five tantos are traded in for a face-down card, the perro ("dog"), worth 10. Card play itself is a colonial inheritance that arrived in the 16th century and was thoroughly adopted into Andean culture; over the centuries the Ecuadorian variant evolved its own rules — particularly the Caída mechanic and the 40-point target — creating a game that feels distinctly local even as it shares ancestry with Spanish games like Brisca and Scopa.

Cuarenta is serious business: national tournaments draw crowds, and skilled players command real respect. The Caída — that moment when you counter your opponent's rank immediately after they capture — is celebrated like a chess fork, a flash of timing and anticipation that separates good players from great ones.