If I joked a little in the pages explaining the rules about how to play based on 3 or 5 players, because of the few and little differences from the version of 4 players, now I’ll really have to treat the version for 2 players differently and properly.

Get ready!!

This game will require all your skills, dramatically lowering the incidence of the luck factor of the game and putting the result in your calculation skills and reasoning.

Here we go.

Divide the deck as usual, separating the cards basing on the color of the back of the card.

The red backed cards, the "Farmland" cards, uncovered, form a field, presenting the four rows of colors in ascending order.

11 white backed cards have to be given to each player.

The ten remaining cards have to be uncovered at the side of the field, and are going to form the the Common Well.

You should come to a situation similar to the one shown in the picture.

The dealer keeps the green backed cards, which will reintegrate in the Common Well, when, during the game, it will be out of cards.

As with all regulations already seen ...

• ...during its own turn, a player may use as many cards as he wants
• ...building number sequences of 4 by 4 that meet color and vegetable
• ...with the key goal of finishing all the cards that are in his possession.

Being the field already prepared, there is obviously no replacements of cards, but each play is placed over the reference cards.

So far, no big news.

Compared with other variants of the game, however, in this case we have a fundamental difference.

If the player does not close the round by playing all his cards before handing the game to the opponent, he must draw from the Common Well as many cards as he plays, going back to having eleven in his hand.

CAUTION: In this variant also it is required to play at least one card. Not only: if you are in the (unlikely but not impossible) position of having to "pass", the game is lost and the opponent makes points as if he closed.

The management of the Common Well is definitely the most interesting strategic key about this variant.

We know that, during our turn, we can play as many cards as we want: 

If we play them all, we win the round and we earn the relative points, otherwise we will return to having eleven cards in hand, drawing from the Common Well as many cards as we played.

The the Common Well is visible to both players and the cards must be drawn in the order in which they occur (the dealer has slightly overlapping cards such to leave no room for doubt about the order of withdrawal).

I’ll make a small example.

Here you can see that the player has placed the 6 and 7 green, and the 6 black.

Before moving the game to the opponent he/she must draw the top three cards of the Common Well (which in the image is slightly shifted to the right).

When the common well is depleted, the dealer makes it “come back to life” by uncovering other 10 cards from the deck.

CAUTION: If a player places more cards than are left in the Common Well, in order to have 11 cards back in his hand, he must Collect all the cards left in the Common Well and take delivery from the dealer of as many COVERED cards as needed to complete the hand.

As such, the dealer will finish up positioning the 10 cards of the common well taking into account how many he has already delivered to the player. So, if in the Common Well there were to be 2 left over cards and the player positions five cards, as soon as the round ends he shall pick both cards from the well and will be given 3 "in the dark" cards from the dealer, whom will continue uncovering SEVEN cards for the Common Well .

The management of the jokers is exactly the same as for the game with 4 players.

The scores don’t change. The only thing that is left out are the prizes for who wins the well, because of the different “in common” management.