How to play Tabinet

Take cards off the table by matching your card's value against what is lying there, and bank the ones that count. Clear the table outright with a single card and you have made a tabla. The deal is scored once the pack is played out, and the first to the match target wins.

Tabinet is played with a 52-card pack by two, three or four players.

Four cards go face up on the table to start, and everybody gets six. When all the hands are empty, six more are dealt and play carries on. The four face-up cards happen once, at the very start, and later hand-outs put nothing new on the table.

One deal is one round: there is no scoring in between.

One card leaves your hand each turn, and there are exactly two things it can do.

1. Capture. Take cards off the table that add up to what your card is worth. Everything you take goes face down into your pile.

2. Trail. Lay your card face up on the table and leave it for somebody else.

Trailing is always allowed, even with a capture staring at you. Turning down a two-card capture to keep the king that will clear the whole table next turn is the central decision of the game.

Above the ten, what a card is worth for capturing is not what is printed on it, and an ace is 1 or 11, whichever you say. Everything else is its own number.

Your card takes any group of table cards that adds up to exactly its value, and it can take several groups at once. What it may not do is use the same table card in two groups.

Aces flex in both directions, and you say which, because that is the difference between a legal capture and an illegal one.

Take the last card off the table with a capture and you have made a tabla: the table is left bare and the next player has no choice but to trail into it.

A tabla is worth a point of its own, on top of whatever the cards you swept turn out to be worth.

Trailing can never make one, because the card you put down is on the table, and neither can the cards handed over at the end of a deal.

When the last card of the pack has been played, whatever is still lying face up goes to the last player who captured. A deal in which nobody captured goes to the dealer.

Then the piles are counted: every ace, ten, jack, queen and king is worth 1, the ten of diamonds, the văcuța mare, is worth 2, the two of clubs 1, every tabla 1, and 3 go to whoever took the most cards, with nothing at all if two are level.

Every other card is worth nothing at the count, however useful it was at capturing.

Deals keep coming, the deal moving one seat on each time, until somebody's total reaches the match target, 101 unless the room was opened at another number. The highest total wins.

The target is checked once, when a deal is counted, so nobody can end a match in the middle of one. If two players finish level, the match is drawn.

Open the scores at the top of the table whenever you like.

Tap a card in your hand, then tap the cards on the table you want to take. The table adds them up as you go and only lets the move through when the group comes to exactly what your card is worth; tap a chosen card again to put it back.

To trail instead, play your card with nothing selected. The button under your hand says which of the two you are about to do.

When an ace is in the move the table asks what you are counting it as, 1 or 11. It never guesses: in the endgame the wrong reading of an ace hands over the last capture.

A practice match runs entirely on your device against bots, with no connection needed. A bot sees only what any opponent could see: your hand and the stock order stay hidden, so it cannot cheat.

Online, a bot steps in for a player who has gone quiet, so the table keeps moving.