Truco Arbiser

Introduction

Truco is a card game with an immense cultural significance in South America, and especially in Argentina, my motherland. I used to play this game for endless evenings with my friends. Truco is similar to Poker in that luck, but also skills and deceit are essential. Nevertheless, having played both, I would say Truco is much deeper in its complexity and relies much less on luck.

Truco Arbiser (a.k.a, Truco) is a 1982 game, first released for the DOS in 1985. It was the first ever implementation of this game on a computer. It was groundbreaking at the moment of its release thanks to its challenging AI opponent, capable of bluffing, sustaining brief conversations, and making smart decisions.

The opponent, the old "Gaucho" guy you see drinking mate in the opening, plays the game the way it should be played: with taunts, rhymes, poetry, and plenty of subtle insults. The interface allows you to write your responses and play the game as if you were actually speaking to the guy. For an 1985 game, this level of immersion was unprecedented.

The goal of the card game is to reach 30 points before your opponent. A normal game may take a few dozen minutes. In this movie, however, I achieve this less than a second. How? by prebuffering all inputs to go "all-in" in the very first play. I choose to play first to able to chant my challenge first before he does. What do I challenge him to? "Falta Envido". And my opponent accepts ("Quiero, che").

The meaning of "Falta Envido" here is the key. This is a challenge that, if rejected, grants the challenger a point, but; if accepted, puts us in a "Duel", where the player whose two cards with the same suit who add up to the highest number wins it. The winner of the Falta Envido is to earn however many points your opponent needs to reach 30. In this case, since the game has just started, it would be 30, exactly what I need to win the game.

Unbeknownst to him, I had manipulated the system clock to get a better hand: (4 + 5 [ + 20 ] = 29) than his (we don't know how much that is, but he chants "Son Buenas", meaning "yours are better than mine", so less or equal than 29). This brings me to 30 points right away. Upon losing, he laments: "Now I want to slash my veins". He recovers his composure quickly and recites:

"You beat me...

but beware

for I am getting to know you

and I dont lose

my memory..."

This is one of those TASes where the sub notes are more important than the movie itself because I don't expect any of you (except maybe Ikuyo ;) to understand what's going on here. I am happy to bring this piece of Argentinian culture to the site and maybe we'll see some hidden "Gauchos" will comment in the Youtube publication, if it gets accepted.

Software + Hardware

Emulator

• EmuHawk 2.11 (Core: DOSBox-x)

ROM

• The game is freely distributed by their authors here: https://www-2.dc.uba.ar/charlas/lud/truco/

• Get the game in .zip format from that page and extract the files into a folder and use this method to create a reproducible .iso file out of them.

• Some of the files get renamed for compatibility with the ISO9660 format. I do the re-renaming manually in the movie so don't worry about this.

• For some reason, this movie is only working for me when played in TAStudio, not directly through the BizHawk interface.