How to Play Truco Paulista
Description
São Paulo's Truco. The vira sets four wild cards every hand, and the shouting is the point.
Objective
Win two of three tricks in each hand, and raise the stakes when you think the table will fold.
Setup
A Spanish 40-card deck, played in pairs. Deal three cards to each player and turn one card face up as the vira.
The card ranking above the vira becomes the manilha — the four highest cards of the hand, ranked by suit: clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds.
Rules
Play three tricks. The highest card takes each one; a tied trick is frozen and decided by the next.
At any point, a player may call truco to raise the hand from one point to three. The other side folds, accepts, or raises again to six, nine and twelve.
Paulista uses the full manilha system with suit-ranked wild cards, which makes bluffing far more aggressive than in simpler Truco forms.
Winning
Win two tricks and you take the hand at whatever stake it reached.
First partnership to twelve points wins the match.