Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Ascension Address: Giolitti As It Is Played

Giolitti is a two-player trick-taking card game thought to have been played widely across northern Italy in the 17th and early 18th century. Despite its popularity, the culture of the game was unusually secretive in nature and little is known about its rules today, beyond the fact that it was played with a tarot deck (most likely a version of the Tarocco Bolognese) and that its trump suit may have reflected and satirised political characters of the time. Cartlesham (1912) suggests that the “Traditore” trump card, which reappears across all known versions of the game, may represent a high-ranking figure from the court of the Doge of Venice, although contemporary sources and card illustrations appear to disagree over the individual’s exact identity.

Replace “Doge” with “Dealer” and “Elector” with “Player”.

posted by Kevan at 16 Mar 2021 11:58:00 UTC Comments (2)

Comments

Bucky:

16-03-2021 21:22:41 UTC

You can’t use the term “Player” for players! The term’s already present in the Appendix as a synonym for Player.

...except that it looks like we never put that appendix entry back after the Treaty Dynasty ended. I don’t know whether to say “oops” or “good riddance”.

Kevan: he/him

17-03-2021 21:38:55 UTC

I’d been waiting for you to add it back since your last dynasty, and when I realised you hadn’t I thought I might as well use it here - it’s hard to think up another word for “person who plays cards” that doesn’t bring along any heavy baggage of playing for money or cheating.

As pointed out elsewhere since, I think it’s an “oops” as we enacted a dynastic rule that used “player”, last dynasty, without anyone noticing. We should put a more robust version back in some time.