Compenso

Cards rarely change their ranks. The Ten of Diamonds card, for example,tends to stay at its rank of ten during the game and then from one game to another and then until it is completely worn out. It is ten forever.

Compenso cards are different. They do not have suits, but instead, probably as any of us, they have their positive and negative sides.

Those sides allow for the card to change its rank during the game. To do that we use coins. If we place a $1 coin on the card’s positive side its rank grows by one. For example, the card below has the rank of 8 (seven plus one on the positive side):

If we put two $1 coins on the negative side of the card as shown below its rank lowers to five (seven minus two):

Often some people want card rank to become higher while others would really like it to go lower. In this case, you might see something like this:

You may guess that three dollars on the negative side of the card compensate for three dollars on the positive side of the card, so the final rank of the card is (seven plus three minus three plus one) eight. This very fight for the card's rank became a reason for the game name: Compenso, which supposedly translates as “counterbalance” in Latin.