The Tarot Game in France Today: Jeu de Tarot

Is the tarot still just a game anywhere in Europe? Yes, and the clearest proof is the french tarot card game, played in millions of French households today with the same seventy-eight card structure examined throughout this series, from the Marseille woodblocks of Nicolas Conver and the Tarot de Marseille of 1760 to the Viennese pattern covered through Industrie und Glück: The Austrian Tarock Game. Jeu de Tarot never stopped being a card game in France; it simply kept evolving its own rulebook while the occultists built an entirely separate literature on the same deck.

A french tarot card game with a federation

Jeu de Tarot is played with a seventy-eight card tarot nouveau deck: four French suits of fourteen cards each and twenty-one numbered trumps plus the Fool (called l'Excuse). Rules vary slightly by region and generation, but the game was formalised nationally when the Fédération Française de Tarot was founded in 1973, standardising scoring and bidding across clubs. That federation still runs tournaments, certifies rules and keeps the game's competitive scene organised the way chess or bridge federations do elsewhere, a level of institutional structure most card games never receive.

Bidding, the dog, and the oudlers

A hand begins with bidding: players declare how ambitious they intend to be, from petite, the mildest contract, up through garde, garde sans and garde contre, each raising the stakes and the scoring multiplier. The chien, a small set-aside pile often called "the dog," gets folded into the winning bidder's hand and then partly returned to the discard, a mechanic unique to French tarot among trick-taking games. Scoring turns on three cards called oudlers, or bouts: the Fool, the lowest numbered trump, and the highest numbered trump. Holding more of these three cards lowers the number of card points a team needs to win the hand, a scoring wrinkle that rewards exactly the kind of card most other games would treat as worthless.

Learning the french tarot card game today

Clubs and community centres across France still teach beginners the basic bidding structure before moving to scoring nuances, much as bridge clubs teach new players conventions gradually. Printed rule booklets packaged with tarot nouveau decks summarise the official federation rules in a few pages, and regional variations, slightly different point values or bidding steps, are common enough that visiting players often ask "which rules" before a hand starts. Despite that local variety, the core structure, bidding, the chien, the oudlers, stays recognisable from one table to the next, which is part of why the game travels well between generations and regions without needing a single governing rulebook enforced everywhere.

Five-player variants and modern play

Alongside the standard three and four-player games, a five-player variant adds a partnership mechanic: the player holding a chosen card becomes a hidden partner to the bidder, unknown to the table until that card is played. The game remains genuinely popular in France today, played in family gatherings, retirement clubs and organised leagues alike, and French-language tarot software and apps keep the game alive for younger players who learned it from parents or grandparents rather than a rulebook. None of this activity has anything to do with divination; it is a living card game with its own strategy literature, much of it untranslated and specific to French card-playing culture.

Why this matters for a Thoth reader

A reader who only knows the tarot through the Thoth deck's correspondences, astrology and Kabbalah can find Jeu de Tarot genuinely disorienting: the same cards, the same count of trumps, used for an entirely secular strategy game with its own jargon, the pagat ultime among French-speaking players' favourite dramatic moments, when the lowest trump survives to the final trick. It is worth remembering that The Fool, treated with real philosophical weight in esoteric readings, is simply l'Excuse in French tarot, a card that excuses its holder from following suit and carries its own fixed point value, nothing more mystical than a wild card with house rules attached.

A deck, two destinies, still running in parallel

France is the one country in this series where both destinies of the tarot run side by side today: the occult tradition descended from Court de Gébelin and Etteilla, and an entirely separate, thriving card game descended from the same deck, formalised and federated, taken just as seriously by its own players. The Wikipedia entry on French Tarot lays out the current official rules in full detail for anyone who wants to learn the game as the French play it.

The game that never left

Jeu de Tarot is a useful corrective to any assumption that the esoteric turn of the 1780s swallowed the tarot whole. In its country of origin for this particular pattern, the deck kept being shuffled, dealt and scored across kitchen tables for two and a half centuries after Court de Gébelin declared it Egyptian wisdom, with most players never giving the trumps' symbolism a second thought. Both histories are real, and both still belong to the same seventy-eight cards.