How to play

1. Setup

In the standard variant for three players, the game uses 2 decks of French playing cards with no jokers, 104 cards in all.

Before starting:

1. 2 cards are removed from the deck and take no part in the hand: they stay face up, visible to everyone;
2. 3 draw stocks of 34 cards each are prepared, face down, one per player;
3. the game starts.

The starting hand is empty. Nobody is dealt any cards: at the start everyone's hand is empty, and everyone begins by drawing from their own stock. Nobody can go out without ever having drawn.

In the video game: the 2 removed cards appear small in a corner of the table at the start of the hand. They can be hidden and shown again at any time, to remember which cards are missing.

2. Goal

Machiavelox is a variant of Machiavelli, from the Rummy family, built entirely on speed.

There are no turns. From the start, each player plays on their own, whenever and as much as they like, at the same time as the others. The only rules added to traditional Machiavelli are there to handle the conflicts that arise when several players go after the same cards at the same moment.

The first player to go out wins, emptying their whole hand.

3. Valid melds

Only two kinds of valid meld may exist on the table.

3.1 The run

Three or more consecutive cards of the same suit.

• Ascending and descending sequences are equivalent: 5♥ 6♥ 7♥ and 7♥ 6♥ 5♥ are the same meld.
• The Ace bridges the King and the 2: the run continues without a break in either direction, so Q♠ K♠ A♠ 2♠ 3♠ is a valid run.
• A run may grow beyond 13 cards, precisely because the Ace makes it continuous. When it goes beyond 10 cards, the system automatically splits it into two runs as equal as possible, both valid, which stay on the table as independent melds.

3.2 The set

Three or four cards of the same value, of necessarily different suits.

Since the suits must all be different, a set can never have more than 4 cards and can never contain two identical cards: 7♥ 7♥ 7♠ is not a valid meld.

3.3 In general

• Every valid meld has at least 3 cards.
• Identical melds may sit on the table together.
• A card laid on the table never goes back into anyone's hand. It can be moved from one meld to another, but it cannot be taken back.

4. The hand, the draw stock, the staging area

Your hand is every card you have drawn and not yet placed on the table in valid melds.

Your draw stock is yours and yours alone. You can draw whenever you like, one card at a time. Once your stock is empty, you can no longer add new cards to your hand.

Your staging area is a part of your hand that, during a complex play, is laid face up on the table in front of you for a while (see §5.3). It is important to understand that:

• the staging area is always part of your hand in every respect: its cards are still yours and have not been played;
• you cannot go out while your staging area is not empty;
• in the end-of-hand counts, the cards in your staging area count as cards in your hand;
• nobody may ever touch another player's staging area, add cards to it or take cards from it.

5. The play

A play is how you bring cards from your hand to the table. There are three kinds, listed below from simplest to most complex, and they do not all work the same way.

In the two direct cases (§5.1 and §5.2) you think and then act, with no intermediate step: the play begins the instant you move your first card. Only in the third case (§5.3), the one that requires moving cards already on the table, must you first declare your intentions by laying the cards face up in your staging area.

In all three cases the same thing holds: you may think as long as you like, but once you have started you have at most 40 seconds to finish. The timer starts from the first card you move in a direct play, or from the declaration in a play with moves.

In all three cases it may happen that halfway through your intention is no longer achievable, because the table has changed before your eyes. In a game built on speed this is a perfectly normal outcome: the cards you can no longer place go back into your hand.

You may have only one open play at a time. The other players may each have one at the same moment.

5.1 Laying a new direct meld

You take 3 or more cards from your hand and lay them in a free space on the table, forming a valid run or set.

In the video game: at a real table this is a single, instant gesture — you take the three kings and put them down, and while your hand is on them nobody touches them. On screen you work one card at a time, and between the first king and the third several seconds would pass in which the first king is on the table like any other card: an opponent could take it away, or attach their own card to it. So the cards are first assembled in the staging area, which nobody can touch, and from there they are laid all together with a single command — Lay the meld — which puts them on the table in one go, if they form a valid meld. Even when you are not moving anything, the staging area simply keeps your cards safe until the meld is complete.

5.2 Adding cards to existing melds

You may add one or more cards from your hand to one or more valid melds already on the table, laid by anyone.

If during the operation you can no longer place a card because someone beat you to it, you take it back into your hand: in this speed-based variant it is a fairly normal outcome.

5.3 Playing by moving cards already on the table

This is the play that characterises the whole Machiavelli family, and it is made in three steps, in this order:

1. First you DECLARE. You lay face up in front of you, in your staging area, the cards you intend to play in this particular operation. This is when you announce your intentions — like a pool player calling the pocket — and it is from here that the 40-second timer starts.
2. Then you MOVE. You rearrange the table by moving cards already played, one card at a time.
3. Finally you PLACE. Last of all, you put the cards from your staging area into the melds on the table.

• the right to move cards on the table is earned by declaring, and lasts until your staging area is empty. You move to make room for a card of your own: with no declared cards there is no card to make room for, and rearranging the table would become a free move;
• while you have cards in your staging area, you do not play from your hand. What you are doing is the gesture you declared: finish it before starting another. This holds even if you rearrange the table and then take your declared cards back: the spaces you opened are not filled from your hand, because that gesture did not finish, it was aborted;
• a single card from your hand never opens a new meld. A card in an empty space is not a meld, and making one always needs other cards: if they are yours, they are laid all together from the staging area (§5.1); if they come from the table, you must declare first;
• you may add cards to your staging area even once the operation is under way: you are still declaring them before placing them, and your opponents still see them before they reach the table;
• you cannot draw new cards from your stock while you have cards in your staging area;
• if in the end you cannot place one or more cards from your staging area, you take them back into your hand: this too is a normal outcome;
• but if you place none of them, your moves do not count. A play that rearranged the table without bringing even one new card of yours onto it is undone entirely, and the table goes back to how it was — together with anyone who had built on it, by the chain rule (§5.5). Otherwise declaring would become a licence for pure disruption: you could show any card, perhaps to move away exactly the card an opponent needs, and then take your own card back without having risked anything. The exception is whoever called «Stop!», during the freeze: in that case the rules ask you to mend the wounds of the table, rearranging it if necessary (§9);
• your staging area is face up, so your opponents can always see the cards you are trying to place this way.

5.4 When the play ends

When the play ends — whether you end it or the 40 seconds run out — the system checks one thing only:

are the melds you touched during the play all valid?

Only your own work is judged. Not the whole table: only the melds you took cards from, the ones you put cards into, the ones you created. What the others are doing at that moment does not concern you and cannot invalidate you.

What is judged is the state produced by your last move, not the state at the instant you finish. Nobody can spoil your play by acting in the meantime: what was valid when you stopped moving stays valid.

Other players' cards «on trial» do not count. A card put on the table by a player whose own play is still open is on trial: until they have finished, they alone answer for it. When your play is judged, your melds are looked at as if those cards were not there — neither against you nor in your favour.

Example. On the table there is 4-5-6♣. An opponent attaches a J♠ to it, which does not belong there at all; right after, you attach your 7♣ in the right place. Your meld is judged as 4-5-6-7♣: it is valid, and your play is confirmed. The J♠ is the business of whoever put it there: if it does not find a place in a valid meld, it goes back into their hand, and theirs alone. The same holds if the jack arrives while you are still assembling your meld, for example between the second and the third 6 of a set. Attaching random cards to other players' melds to make them fail becomes a pointless strategy. There is only one case in which another player's work on trial counts for you: when you needed it. If an opponent attaches the 7♣ to 4-5-6♣ and you then attach the 8♣, your 8 would not stand without that 7: the 7 is part of your work, and it is counted for you. With the consequence that if that 7 falls, your 8 falls too (§5.5).

• If everything is valid, the play is confirmed.
• If something is invalid, what you did on the melds that remain invalid falls, and with it everything that depends on it (see §5.5): those cards go back into your hand and those melds go back to how they were. The work you did elsewhere, where you left things in order, stays on the table.

When the 40 seconds run out, the play ends anyway, by itself, with exactly the same criterion: if your work is valid it is confirmed, otherwise it is undone.

5.5 The chain undo

When an action cannot be completed validly, the cards that found no place in a valid meld go back into the hand. And since someone else may have built on those cards in the meantime, their work falls too, in a chain: cards that leaned on cards that have gone cannot stay on the table.

A single principle governs everything:

The undo reaches exactly as far as the dependencies reach, and no further.

When one action depends on another. The chain follows two tracks.

• The cards. Whoever used a card that goes back always falls with it: a card that returns to its place cannot also stay where someone had taken it afterwards.
• The melds. Whoever worked later on the same meld, without using its cards, falls with it only if they needed it: that is, if without that card the meld with their action in it would be left invalid. Having arrived later is not enough.

Two examples show the difference.

Disruption drags nobody down. On the table there is 4-5-6♣; an opponent attaches a J♠ to it, you attach the 7♣. When the jack goes back into their hand, 4-5-6-7♣ remains, valid: your 7 did not need the jack, and it stays where it is. Only the J♠ goes back.

Whoever really needed it falls. I take a card from a meld, which is left incomplete; you, to fix it, put a card of yours there. We touched no card in common, but if my play falls and my card returns to its place, next to yours the meld no longer stands: your card goes back along with mine. In the same way, if an opponent attaches the 7♣ to 4-5-6♣ and you add the 8♣, when their 7 falls your 8 falls too, because 4-5-6-8♣ is not a run.

The criterion, in both cases, is the same: the question is not who came first or later, but what happens to the meld if that card disappears.

What is not connected, on the other hand, does not fall. Within the forty seconds of a play you can do several independent things: attach a card to a meld that stays wounded and, as a separate gesture, extend another that remains perfectly valid. If the first gesture fails, only that card goes back into your hand: the second has nothing to do with it and stays where it is.

At a real table this would not even need saying, because there a play is a single gesture: I take some cards and arrange them. Here, since there are no start and end buttons, the play is the interval from your first move until your work is back in order — and several independent gestures can fit in that interval. It is an artefact of the video game: it does not change the substance of the rule.

One clarification is needed: undoing can wound. If taking back a card leaves a meld incomplete, whatever had been put there earlier and would now be left orphaned comes down too. This repeats until no card left on the table leans on an invalid meld — in the worst case everything falls, but that is the worst case, not the rule.

Plays already finished that the chain reaches fall entirely. This difference is not an oversight: it is a matter of responsibility. Whoever made them has already finished and is no longer there to fix things, and undoing only part of their work could bring a meld back to a state that was legitimate only during that play — incomplete, as is normal halfway through — leaving it with nobody to finish it.

Whoever is still at work, instead, loses only the connected piece. They are present, their forty seconds are still running, and they see what is taken from them: their play stays open, with the remaining work, and they can fix it. This holds for whoever is playing right now as for anyone else with an open play when the chain passes.

The exception is the explicit give-up (the «Cancel the meld» button): it removes all your own work, even the perfectly valid part, because it is the player's choice and not a verdict on their work.

Two more consequences worth knowing:

• a play already confirmed can be undone after the fact by a chain undo: its cards go back into the hand of whoever played them. It is the only exception to the rule «a card on the table never goes back into anyone's hand», and it holds because that play is treated as if it never happened;
• draws are never undone: the cards you drew stay yours.

The chain cannot go back more than 40 seconds, because that is how long a play can last at most.

In the video game: a play just finished stays marked as not yet safe as long as the chain can still reach it — at most forty seconds — after which it becomes final and you can see it at a glance. If a chain undo hits you, you get a notice explaining what was undone and which failed play caused it.

6. Conflicts

With everyone playing at once, the same card may be sought by several players at the same moment.

Only one card of the table can be moved at a time. While you «hold» a card, it is yours and nobody can take it from you; but you cannot hold two.

Taking a card from the table requires having declared, exactly like moving it: while your staging area is empty, you do not lay hands on the cards of the table. And a card you have taken must be moved: after 10 seconds it becomes free for everyone again, and if you try to move it where it cannot go, it drops back by itself. Nobody can therefore block a card that someone else needs by holding it without doing anything.

The fastest wins. If two players want the same card, whoever gets there first gets it. The other receives a refusal and has to manage differently.

Ping-pong. If during two or more simultaneous plays the same card is moved back and forth, returning for the third time to a position it had already occupied, the conflict is considered out of hand: from that moment the card is reserved for the player who started their own play first. The others must give it up, and if they needed it to complete their operation, they have to take the cards of their staging area back into their hand.

In the video game: the order is the order in which actions reach the server. While a player has an open play, the whole area of the table they are reworking is marked with their colour: you can see at a glance where the table is shifting ground and where it is still. A card someone is holding is shown as taken and cannot be selected.

7. Inactivity

When for 2 minutes nobody draws and nobody completes a play that places cards of their own on the table, the game unblocks itself.

The countdown restarts from zero only with a draw or with a confirmed play that brought at least one of your own cards onto the table, from your hand or from your staging area. It never stops, not even while someone is playing: until a play has ended it could still be undone, and so for the table nothing has happened yet.

Just moving cards already on the table is not enough. Rearranging the table remains legitimate, but it does not stop the clock: otherwise a player who is behind could keep the hand alive for ever, shuffling the melds every two minutes without ever playing anything of their own. This way every hand ends: the forced draws empty the stocks, and from then on every minute gained costs at least one card from the hand.

When this timer runs out, only one of these two things can happen:

• if at least one stock is not empty → every player who still has a stock draws 1 card by force and play resumes;
• if all stocks are empty → a forced draw is impossible and the hand ends with a count of the cards (see §10).

Extreme case: if the forced draw happens just while you are in the middle of a play with your staging area — during which drawing is not allowed — your new card is handed to you as soon as the play ends.

8. Going out

You go out when you have no cards left in your hand, staging area included. Going out takes effect at the moment your play is confirmed, not at the instant your hand becomes empty: if that play is undone, you have not gone out yet.

To go out validly you must have met two conditions during the whole hand:

1. having drawn at least one card;
2. having laid at least one direct meld of your own with 3 or more cards from your hand — a valid run or set, laid by you.

Since the hand is empty at the start, in practice you need at least 3 draws to be able to go out.

The second condition is acquired once and for all. If you laid your set of Kings, the right to go out is yours for ever: it does not matter if someone later takes that set apart. The condition has been met and is never lost.

Invalid going out — emptying your hand without having met the two conditions — means elimination from the hand with −15 points.

Be careful not to confuse two outcomes: if your going-out play is undone, you simply have not gone out yet, the cards go back into your hand and play continues, with no penalty at all. Elimination only happens for a going out actually completed, yet unwittingly invalid.

9. «Stop!»

At any moment, once per hand, each player may call «Stop!».

You can call «Stop!» whenever you like, even while your opponents are playing.

What happens

The game of the other two freezes completely: their plays in progress stay suspended as they are — they are not undone — and all their times stop. Nobody can do anything any more.

Whoever called «Stop!» has 3 minutes to try to go out with no interference at all. During the freeze the 40-second limit per play does not apply: three full minutes to use freely.

The table must be left in order

You do not go out leaving open wounds on the table. If at the moment of the freeze the table has irregularities — including those produced by opponents' plays left suspended — it is up to whoever called «Stop!» to mend them, with their own cards or by rearranging the table. The freeze gives exclusive control of the table, and whoever is in sole command answers for everything. That is why, during a freeze, every card on the table is at your disposal, even those an opponent was holding a moment earlier. An opponent's staging area is never a wound: it is their hand laid face up, it stays untouchable and does not stop you going out.

It pays to look at the table before calling «Stop!»: the more people are at work, the more wounds you may have to take on.

How it ends

• If you go out validly, you have won the hand (which holds even without calling «Stop!»). The freeze is absolute: the hand ends exactly in that state, no chain undo can touch it any more, and the count is made from there.
• If you do not go out within the 3 minutes of the freeze, or if your going out is invalid, you are eliminated from the hand with −15 points. The freeze ends, play resumes without you and all times restart from where they had stopped. You can also give up before time runs out: the penalty is the same, but you do not keep the others waiting.
  • Only exception: the plays that had been left suspended restart with a full 40 seconds, not with the time they had left. In the meantime the table may have changed under them at the hands of whoever stopped the game, and that is not the fault of whoever was playing.
• If the eliminated players become two, the only one left in play is automatically the winner of the hand.

What stays on the table if you are eliminated

The work you did during the freeze is judged with the normal criteria (§5.4): if the melds you touched are valid, everything stays where it is; if not, your play is undone entirely and the table goes back exactly to how it was at the instant you called «Stop!».

So you can never, in any case, leave the table more irregular than you found it. The only wounds that can survive the freeze are the ones that were there before: they belong to the opponents' plays left suspended, come back to life with them and remain the responsibility of whoever opened them, who will have to mend them in the time they have left.

10. Other possible endings

When all the stocks are empty, the hand can end in two ways.

10.1 The final silence

If for 2 minutes nobody lays down anything (§7), the hand ends instantly (without anyone going out): the player with the fewest cards in hand at that moment wins (always counting the cards in the staging area too).

If there is no tie, it ends here.

10.2 The tie-break

If two or more players are tied on the lowest number of cards, a 2-minute tie-break is played.

Only the tied players take part: any third player is already out of it.

The tied players lay all their cards face up in front of them, forming a single shared pile. Here the winning condition changes: it is no longer about going out, but about being the first to place on the table at least one card, any card, from the shared pile, in any valid meld.

• The normal sequence of a play and the 40-second limit always apply.
• Victory comes when the play is confirmed: if it is undone, you have not won yet.
• During the tie-break the «Stop!» button does not exist.

If after the 2 minutes of tie-break nobody has managed to place at least one card, the hand is a DRAW between the tied players.

11. Absence and leaving

Machiavelox is played by three. But what if a connection drops, a phone freezes, a call comes in? The game tells a momentary absence apart from leaving.

11.1 Someone who is away is simply «dormant»

If a player stops showing up, the other two keep playing without waiting for them, and nothing stops for them: times run on, their plays expire by themselves, the table goes on. They block nobody — as if they were simply playing badly.

When they come back they pick up from where they were, except for what expired in the meantime: a play left open will have ended by itself, and the cards they did not manage to place will have gone back into their hand.

There is only one exception, and it is the «Stop!»: see §11.4.

11.2 After 90 seconds, absence becomes leaving

After 90 seconds without showing up, the player has officially left:

• they get −15, the same penalty as an eliminated player (§9);
• they no longer play in this hand, but their cards stay on the table of the game and count in the winner's score, exactly like those of an eliminated player;
• they cannot come back: if they reconnect they find a notice, and can only watch.

If two players leave, the third wins the hand at the instant the second leaving becomes official. It is the same survivor rule that applies to eliminations (§9). In the same way, if one of the two tied players leaves during a tie-break, the other wins.

If everyone leaves, the hand ends with no winner, and each gets the −15 for leaving. Leavings that happen at the same instant are judged together: nobody wins as a survivor just because their leaving was counted last.

At the instant of leaving, any open play ends automatically with the normal criterion (§5.4), as when the 40 seconds run out: valid work stays on the table, the rest and the staging area go back into the hand, and any card you were holding becomes free.

When absence does not count. The 90 seconds measure someone who could play and does not. So they do not run for someone who cannot do anything:

• during a freeze, for the two frozen players: the count restarts from zero when the freeze ends;
• during a tie-break, for whoever is not taking part and is waiting for the other two to settle it;
• at the start of the game, the count starts from the start, not from the last time you showed up in the waiting room.

11.3 Leaving openly

Whoever wants to leave should not vanish and wait: there is the Leave button, which asks for confirmation and immediately applies the same outcome — penalty, out of the hand, no coming back. It is more honest towards yourself and more courteous towards the other two, who would otherwise be left wondering whether you are about to come back.

11.4 The only case in which an absent player weighs on the others

Whoever called «Stop!» freezes the other two for up to 3 minutes. If they vanish right after pressing it, the others would spend those three minutes in front of a frozen screen, waiting for someone who will not come back. Therefore: if the player who stopped the game is declared to have left, the freeze ends instantly, with the outcome it would have had on running out — failed freeze and elimination. The pointless freeze is thus cut from three minutes to a minute and a half.

11.5 The card left in your hand

As long as you are holding a card from the table it is yours, and nobody can take it (§6). But if you vanish while holding it, that card would stay blocked for ever and the others' game would suffer with no remedy. That is why your hold on a card expires after 10 seconds (§6): after that the card is free for everyone.

11.6 In long games

In friendly games of several hands, whoever left a hand comes back in the next one, provided they are back when the pause between the two ends: whoever is still absent at that point is out of the game, and the game ends (§13).

In the video game: the others always see who is absent and for how long, and they see when an absence has become leaving.

12. Scoring

The winner of the hand earns

+50 points
− the number of cards left in their own stock
+ the number of cards left in the opponents' hands

The count of the opponents' cards includes both the cards in their staging areas and those of any eliminated player.

Bonus +10 points for whoever goes out having used up all 34 cards of their stock.

In general, then, going out late tends to be worth more than going out early: whoever goes out early still has many cards in their stock to subtract and finds few points in the opponents' hands.

The same formula also applies to whoever wins by final silence once the stocks are empty.

The others

In a draw, the total of the shared pile is subtracted from each player: it is shared, and since it is a draw, the tie holds in the points too.

Scores can be negative.

The minimum of −15 only matters when the shared pile exceeds 65 cards, that is, when in practice nobody has played: in that case, without the minimum, staying at the table would cost more than leaving it. Staying seated must never cost more than leaving.

13. Games

Single game. One hand only: the points are awarded and it ends there. It can be friendly or competitive. Competitive games, played in the agora with opponents matched automatically, are always single, and the points earned go into the general agora ranking.

Long game of several hands. Among friends only: a series of hands, with the points added up each time. The points of friendly games stay private and never enter the general ranking.

• Here the target is 150 points. At the end of a hand, whoever has reached the target and has more points than anyone else wins the game. If at the top, beyond the target, two or more players are level on points, the game ends in a LONG DRAW: no winner, and no extra hand.
• Between one hand and the next there is a pause of at most one minute, to look at the ranking. If all three say they are ready, it ends sooner.
• Whoever leaves a hand comes back in the next one (§11.6), and until then stays bound to this game.
• Machiavelox is played by three, and only by three. Whoever leaves the game ends it at once, and whoever remains and is in the lead wins: whoever leaves never wins, not even if they were first. If two leave, the only one left wins; if those remaining are level on points, it is a long draw; if nobody is left, nobody wins. You leave the game in two ways:
  • with the «Leave the game» button, during the pause;
  • by being absent when the pause ends, that is, without showing up for at least 90 seconds: whoever loses their connection during a hand leaves that hand, but if they are back before the end of the pause they come back in the next one.