Bestia (game)

Bestia is a traditional Italian card game, a gambling and trick-taking game played with a 40-card Italian deck and closely related to Briscola and Tressette, two of Italy's best-known card games. Its name, meaning beast in Italian, reflects the game's place within the wider Rams family of card games, a group of trick-taking gambling games sharing common ancestry with the French game Bete, first recorded as early as 1608. The earliest known Italian description of Bestia itself dates to 1753. The game is typically played by three to ten people seated around the table in an anti-clockwise order, with cards ranked from the ace as highest down through the court cards to the numbered cards, and it carries a notably high degree of chance alongside its trick-taking strategy, making outcomes hinge as much on the deal as on player skill.