Trappola is an early 16th-century Venetian trick-taking card game which spread to most parts of Central Europe and survived, in various forms and under various names like Trapulka, Bulka and Hundertspiel until perhaps the middle of the 20th century.

We know from the Italian polymath and 'gambling scholar' Girolamo Cardano that Trappola was current in Venice "as early as 1524 and probably invented there".

[2] The original Venetian version described by Cardano in reasonable detail was for only two players and played without trumps or bidding.

One particularly widespread descendant was Hundertspiel, also misleadingly called Hunderteins-Spiel, whose rules first appear in an 1824 treatise[5] and in which two teams of two players competed to be first to reach the target of 100 points, hence the name.

[6] However in 1988, Piatnik restarted production of a 36-card pack using a design of Trappola cards made in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1875.

Trappola packs have only 36 cards, lacking numerals from three to six, and using the Italian suits of swords, batons, cups and coins.

The names of the suits, called Denáry (Coins), Kopy (Cups), Špády (Swords), and Baštony (Batons) in Czech, are loan words borrowed from their Italian counterparts.

The earliest surviving rules were recorded by Gerolamo Cardano in his 1564 Liber de Ludo Aleae.