This page is a translated archive of the original Académie des jeux oubliés, created on July 1, 2026, from the French original at salondesjeux.fr.
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This page is a translated archive of the original Académie des jeux oubliés, created on July 1, 2026, from the French original at salondesjeux.fr.
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Faro
Faro (Pharaon) is a card game on which players place bets, that was played in France at the end of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century. A variant of Bassette, Faro quickly supplanted it. It faced the same bans as its predecessor. In 1708, Rémond de Montmort, in his Essai d'analyse sur les jeux de hasard, demonstrated that Faro was even more heavily weighted in favor of the banker than Bassette. The rules presented here concern mainly the changes made relative to those of Bassette.
1. The turn
The turn is still made up of two cards, but, unlike in Bassette, the banker reveals the two cards simultaneously, placing the first to his right and the second to his left.
The card placed on the right is called the "banker's card" and makes the banker win. The word banker's [face] should not be confused with the term used in Bassette, where it refers on one hand to the very first card of the pack revealed by the banker, and on the other hand to the first card he turns up after a punter's stake on a new card in his book during play. In Bassette, a punter who loses on such a "face" card is said to be faced.
The card placed on the left is called the "punter's card" and makes the banker lose.
2. Winnings and losses of the banker
Being faced (in the Bassette sense) has no effect on the banker's winnings: he always takes the entire stake, whereas in Bassette, in the case of a face, he only takes two thirds of it.
When the two cards of a turn form a pair, the banker takes half of the bet (stake and any paroli) from the punter who has bet on the matching card. In Bassette, the banker takes the entire bet, except in the case of a face, for which he only takes two thirds.
If the banker loses the advantage he had on pairs, he gains another one on faces, which no longer exist.
For the rest, all the rules of Bassette and the ways of playing it apply equally to Faro.
As in Bassette, the small paix consists, for the punter who has just won, in replaying only his winnings. To do this the punter leaves his stake and takes his winnings, which are equal to the amount of his stake, which amounts to risking only his winnings.
The Dictionnaire des jeux by Lacombe, at the end of the eighteenth century, describes another way of proceeding that is found in the literature: the punter attempting the small paix does not take his winnings, and moves his original stake under his card, bending its corner as if making a paroli. If the punter wins again, he either takes twice the amount of his stake, or decides to attempt the grand paix by making a new paroli, bending the corner of his card a second time. If he wins the grand paix, he takes four times the amount of his stake. If the punter loses the small or the grand paix, he retrieves his stake, which he had placed underneath his card.
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