2025-01-04
In my documentation of Mariglia I noted, somewhat in passing, that it’s sometimes called il bridge sardo—Sardinian Bridge. Seen from above, Mariglia is a trick-taking game consisting of 2 teams of 2 players each, sitting across from each other, which serves as a fine approximation of Bridge, too.
Bridge is not only (for many) the paradigmatic 4-person trick-taking game; it’s also (for many) the paradigmatic game of intellectual skill and strategy. Bridge, famously, is not a game of luck, big swings, boisterousness, drunkenness. It is a game of silence, deep concentration, and a strictly aspirational class sensibility. While Mariglia is in no way (as we will see) a game of silence, it’s to be expected that any community of play that wants to claim for itself a little bit of intellectual cachet would gravitate to the comparison.
Nevertheless: I’m glad to report, after more time actually spent teaching and playing the game, that I overlooked its most important characteristics in my earlier picture of it, and in so doing overlooked how it truly might be called il bridge sardo.
Simply put, I took a too-formalist view of the game in my earlier characterization.
To begin with, in my discussion of the deal, I waved away different segmentations of the cards to be dealt—two packets of five, individual cards to each player, etc—as “mathematically equivalent”, when any long-time card player at any pub or kitchen table knows that the way those ten cards are actually distributed matters very much indeed. While a perfectly-shuffled deck will of course yield the same distributions no matter how the cards are split up, the decks that are dealt in the real world are not perfectly shuffled: they are at best imperfectly-shuffled, with at least some traces of the previous tricks preserved in perfect sequence, and in some particular games the degree to which they are (if at all) shuffled between hands is controlled so as to encourage certain distributions in the redealt cards.
But more significant is how I accounted for the rules around communication. In my earlier view, while the rules about who can say what and when in the play of a hand were certainly part of the definition (so to speak) of a game, they were also strictly subordinate to the mechanics: who can do what, and when, with the cards. I think I’ve often tended to account for differences in the rules governing communication as reflective of the games’ cultures of origin: Latin and Italian games tend to allow more table talk, sometimes even secret signals between players; Germanic and Anglophone gaming traditions tend to assume that any out-of-band communication is simply cheating. But these rules have more to do with the culture than with the game, and a good game should be wholly portable into a different culture of communication without losing the interesting bits. The same game can also be played to a stricter or looser standard of communication depending on the seriousness of the environment: certain grimaces or even vocalizations of dismay add to the atmosphere when I’m playing Euchre at the bar after work, and those same sounds (which betray information about what’s in my hand) might be completely out of the spirit when I’m playing in a tournament.
The reality is of course more complex and more interesting. The rules governing what kind of communication is allowed do have an impact on the atmosphere in which the game is played; but at the same time, in the majority of cases, the rules governing communication should be read as interacting directly with the rules governing cardplay. Every non-trivial card game depends to a lesser or greater extent on the fact that every player has a differing understanding of the distribution of the cards. Nearly every game worth practicing involves to a lesser or greater extent a gradual refinement of one’s understanding through inferences from gameplay: West must be void in hearts, or else they couldn’t have trumped my Queen.
Thus: the information that a player is allowed to give to their partner (and, critically, to the table) has a meaningful interaction with what they are allowed to do with their cards and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Different Italian games, for instance, afford different signals, and their specifics are very much inside of the text, so to speak, of the game. At Tressette, for instance, we see there are at least two sets of signals, each one with its own meaning. Which set is allowed, and what meanings are assigned, matters quite a bit to how the game plays. One simply cannot say certain things under one set that one can under the other, which means that certain situations of play will be easier or harder to win at. And, at least as presented in Pagat, those two sets are well-defined sets, and not just a grab-bag of different terminologies; it might well be that introducing tutto fuori while preserving the ability to say liscio would result in a totally chaotic, imbalanced game (or it might not; interested readers are invited to experiment and report back).
More critically: we see that at Tressette it’s important that each signal be understood in the same way by both partner and opponent:
It is a convention that players do not bluff with “busso” and “ribusso”. A player who says one of these really has the indicated card. It is permissible to bluff with “tutto fuori”, but probably not advisable, since it will confuse your partner.
Here emerges the comparison back to Bridge, because Bridge is (as I have often argued, annoyingly) above all a game of communication, but the cardinal inviolable rule upon which all engineering of complex Bridge bidding systems rests is: whatever the meaning of a particular bid within a particular system, that meaning must be equally available to your partner and to the opposing team. A bidding system absolutely may not be a secret code, and a team absolutely may not arrange that a particular bid communicates more about the bidder’s hand to their partner than it does to their opponents.
So too with Mariglia. To refresh your memory: at Mariglia—quite unlike every other example I’ve seen of games in its family—one of the two teams has, at any given time, the right to confer. Unlike at Tressette, the partners don’t communicate via signals, and unlike at Bridge, their communication doesn’t have to be forced into the shape of the system of bids; instead, a player on the communicating team is allowed to ask any questions they want before they play a card.
What’s critical here is that the exact same standard of shared understanding holds. To quote Pagat:
- All information and answers to questions must be truthful.
- All communication must be clear and comprehensible to all players at the table. The use of secret meanings or codes when communicating is strictly prohibited.
It’s worth noting that we see some variations, in specific contexts, on the rule about truthfulness, but none at all on the other rule.
What one quickly finds when one plays Mariglia is that much of the meat of the game lies in decision-making about what questions to ask and when. Immediately, the player has to consider what information about their partner’s hand would be most useful to them in playing; but at all times they are keenly aware that their opponents are listening, and that anything their partner reveals might be more useful to their opponents than it is to them.
Thus, while the table is noisier than at a proper game of Bridge, the talk is far from boisterous, drunken, stereotypically Latin. The players are engaging in a careful back-and-forth, sharing critical information while trying not to give anything away unnecessarily, and judging that what is divulged to the other team is worth the cost.
In other words, far from being a sort of extratextual dimension to the game, having more to do with atmosphere and cultural norms of sportsmanship, the Mariglia player finds that the communicative dimension is just as much one of skill and technique as that of cardplay. On the entry in an Italian books database for the book “La Mariglia Sarda”, I was amused to see a single comment:
Giocavo a mariglia con amici. Il mio compagno mi ha chiesto quante picche avevo in mano, io non gli ho voluto rispondere per non scoprire il gioco. Potevo farlo? dovevo per forza rispondere, ho potevo dare altre indicazioni?
My translation:
I was playing mariglia with friends. My partner asked me how many spades I had in my hand; I didn’t want to answer him so as not to give away the game. Could I refuse to answer? Did I have to answer, or could I give different information?
My personal answer, of course, would be: the player had to answer, and truthfully. Their partner had presumably chosen badly in asking that particular question, and now the partnership would suffer for their bad tactics.
Thus I return with a greater respect for the game, and a greater respect for the appelation bridge sardo. And further: I have another reason to recommend Mariglia over Bridge. Bridge is a game of information; but one constrained to fit that information into the dramatically-reduced signal space of a set of bids for trump suit and number. At Mariglia, we are presented with no such constraint; and yet, the most interesting part of the skill involved is perfectly the same, because by far the most important constraint—that the information conveyed must have the same meaning to every player at the table—remains in place.