Trick Taking Card Games

A trick-taking game has three defining features. First, play proceeds in rounds called tricks, where each player contributes exactly one card. Second, one card in each trick is determined to be the winner by a fixed rule, and that player takes all the cards played. Third, the game's outcome is decided by what those tricks contain or how many of them you took.

That is the whole definition, and it excludes a lot. Rummy games are about collecting sets from a draw pile and are not trick-taking. Shedding games like Crazy Eights and Uno are about getting rid of cards and have no trick structure. Blackjack and Poker are betting games against a house or a pot. Solitaire has no opponents. None of these are in the family regardless of how popular they are.

The family is old. Card games arrived in Europe in the late fourteenth century, and the German game Karnöffel, first recorded in 1426, is commonly cited as the earliest documented game with a privileged suit whose cards beat others. Trumps in the modern sense appear with the Italian trionfi or tarot packs in the fifteenth century. The precise lineage is genuinely disputed among game historians, so treat any confident single origin story with caution.

One player leads, meaning they play the first card of the trick and thereby set the suit led. Every other player, in turn, must follow suit — play a card of that same suit — if they hold one. This obligation is the single most important rule in the family, because it is what stops the game from being a simple contest of who holds the highest cards. It forces you to spend cards you would rather keep.

If a player holds no card of the led suit, they are void in it, and they may play anything. What they choose to play is one of the most informative acts in any trick-taking game: it usually either wins the trick with a trump or discards something worthless, and both choices tell the observant players a great deal about the hand.

The trick is won by the highest card of the suit led, unless someone has played a trump, in which case the highest trump wins. The winner of the trick leads the next one, which means winning a trick is not purely a gain — it also obliges you to open the next trick, and being on lead at the wrong moment is a real liability in many games. Play continues until every card in hand is gone.

A trump is a card that beats any card of any other suit regardless of rank. The two of a trump suit outranks the ace of everything else. Games differ enormously in how the trump suit is chosen, and the method tells you a lot about the game's character.

Some games fix it permanently. Spades is the obvious case: spades are trump every single deal, forever, which removes an entire decision and makes the game faster to learn. Some games turn a card up from the stock — Whist traditionally exposes the dealer's last card, and Euchre and Oh Hell turn an upcard that players may accept or reject. Some games auction it: in Bridge and Tarneeb the winner of the bidding names trump, so the right to choose is itself a contested prize.

And some games have no trump at all. Hearts never has one. Bridge allows notrump contracts, which are usually the highest-scoring and hardest to play because there is no way to stop a long suit once the opponents get in. Playing both trumped and trumpless deals teaches you what trumps are actually for: they let a short-suited hand fight back against a long-suited one.

Games also differ on whether you may lead a trump, and on whether you must play one. Spades forbids leading a spade until spades are broken by being played on a trick where someone was void, which stops the first leader from stripping the trump suit out immediately. Callbreak and Belote oblige the opposite — you must trump when you are void, and often must beat the current best card if you can.

In a plain-trick game the only thing that matters is how many tricks you won. The cards inside them are irrelevant; a trick containing the two of clubs and three other low cards counts exactly the same as one containing four aces. This is the largest and most accessible branch.

Whist is the ancestor: no bidding, thirteen tricks, one point for each trick beyond six. Bridge is the elaborate descendant, adding an auction, notrump contracts, a dummy hand and doubling, but still counting nothing but tricks. Spades sits between them — a fixed trump suit and a simple numeric bid, with ten points per bid trick made and a bag penalty for overshooting. Euchre uses a short deck and five-trick hands with the bowers reordering the trump suit. Tarneeb, Callbreak and Oh Hell are all plain-trick games with different bidding rules bolted on.

The distinctive skill in this branch is contract estimation — looking at a hand and predicting how many tricks it is worth — followed by the technique of actually converting that estimate, which usually means managing your trump length, timing when you take the lead, and knowing when to deliberately lose a trick.

In a point-trick game the cards themselves carry values and you are counting the value of what you capture, not the number of piles. This changes which cards are good, often dramatically, and it makes the tenth trick potentially worth more than the first nine.

Belote is a clean example: aces are worth eleven and tens ten, but in the trump suit the jack is worth twenty and the nine is worth fourteen, so the ranking inside trump is completely different from outside it. Skat, Germany's national card game, and Sheepshead use a similar structure where jacks are permanent top trumps. Pinochle adds a melding phase where combinations held in hand score before a card is played. French Tarot uses a 78-card pack with a 21-card permanent trump suit and counts card points in halves.

Point-trick games are usually harder than they look, because winning a trick can be actively bad if it cost you a valuable card to do it, and because you must track roughly how many points have been captured rather than simply counting piles. The reward is a much richer set of decisions per trick.

Evasion games, sometimes called reverse or negative games, invert the goal: you are trying not to take tricks, or not to take particular cards. Hearts is the standard example — every heart costs a point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, and the lowest score wins. There is no trump suit, because a trump would give you a way to avoid being trapped, and being trapped is the game.

Barbu and its relatives go further by cycling through several negative objectives across a session — avoid tricks, avoid queens, avoid taking the last trick — and mixing in positive contracts. The nil bid inside Spades is an evasion contract embedded in a plain-trick game, which is why nil hands feel like a completely different exercise from ordinary ones.

The skill here is the mirror image of everything else: you want low cards, you fear aces, you count who is void so you know who can be made to take a trick, and being on lead is often a punishment rather than a reward.

Exact bidding appears in every branch. Most games reward taking at least your bid, Oh Hell requires exactly your bid, and Spades sits in between by allowing overtricks while quietly taxing them through the bag rule. Whether overtricks are free, taxed or fatal is one of the fastest ways to characterise a game. Partnership structure is a second axis: Bridge, Whist, Spades, Euchre, Belote, Tarneeb and partnership Pinochle are two-against-two, which brings the whole discipline of signalling through card choice, while Hearts, Oh Hell, Skat and Callbreak are individual games where alliances are informal and temporary.

Trick-and-draw games form a distinct subgroup where the hand is replenished from a stock after each trick and following suit is optional until the stock runs out. Sixty-Six and Briscola work this way, and they play very differently because the first half of the hand is about building position rather than converting it. If you know one branch well, the fastest way to grow is to learn one game from each of the others.