How to play 29

Four players, two sides, partners facing each other across the table. A trick your partner takes is a trick your side takes, and the two of you keep one score between you.

The pack holds twenty eight card points, and every deal is an auction for a share of them. Somebody says a number, that number becomes what their side has to take, and taking it is worth a game point. Falling short costs one.

A trick is four cards, one from each seat in turn, gathered by whoever played the strongest. Eight tricks use up every hand. What was in them is what the bid was about, so a pile of tricks and a pile of points are two different things.

Sevens, eights, nines, tens, jacks, queens, kings and aces, in all four suits. Thirty two cards, and nothing below a seven is in the pack at all.

Inside a suit the order runs jack, nine, ace, ten, king, queen, eight, seven. The jack is the best card and the nine is second, which is the one thing everybody has wrong on their first evening. Anybody arriving from Call Break has it backwards: here the ace is third and the king cannot touch it.

Points are a separate matter. A jack is worth three, a nine two, an ace one and a ten one. The king, the queen, the eight and the seven are worth nothing. That is seven points a suit and twenty eight in the pack, and the auction is a bid for a share of exactly those twenty eight.

Strength and value do not move together, and the ten is where they come apart. Fourth in strength, joint third in points: a card worth winning and a poor card to win with. A side can take five of the eight tricks and still lose the deal, because tricks are not what anybody counts.

1. Shuffle the thirty two and deal four cards to each player, one at a time, starting with the player after the dealer.
2. That same player speaks first. Bid a number from sixteen up, or pass. Every bid after the first has to beat the one before it.
3. Passing does not put you out of the auction. Three passes in a row end it, so a seat that passed early can come back in when the bidding reaches it again.
4. If all three pass and nobody has bid, the deal lands on the dealer at sixteen. There is no choice in it and no way to decline.
5. Whoever took the auction chooses a trump suit and puts it face down without saying what it is. Then the remaining four cards go out and the player after the dealer leads the first trick.

You bid on four cards and play with eight, which is why sixteen is a guess rather than a promise. The player who took the auction is the bidder and their side has to find the points. The other two are the defenders, and all they have to do is keep them from it.

The bidder does not lead. The first trick is led by the player after the dealer, whoever that turns out to be, and after that the winner of each trick leads the next one.

Follow suit if you can. If you cannot, play anything you like: there is no duty to trump and no duty to beat. Throwing a jack away on a trick you have already lost is legal here, and against a good side it is sometimes the only card that makes sense.

The trump goes face down and it stays there. The bidder knows it. Nobody else does, and that includes their own partner, who has to lead, discard and defend the contract without being told what they are playing for.

Until somebody asks, a trump is an ordinary card of its own suit. Play the seven of clubs on a trick led with hearts while clubs are secretly trump, and it is a seven of clubs. It takes nothing, and the highest heart gathers the trick the way it would have anyway.

A trick already gathered stays gathered. Turning the suit up never reaches backwards, so nothing that happened while it was down is reopened and no points change hands after the fact.

That is what makes the secret worth keeping. An unasked trump is a dead card on both sides of the table, and a player sitting on five of them holds nothing at all until somebody turns the suit up.

You may ask only when you cannot follow the suit that was led, and never on your own lead. The suit comes up for the whole table at once and stays up for the rest of the deal.

It counts from that trick onward, including the cards already lying in it. So a card somebody put down two turns earlier, when nobody knew what trumps were, can win the trick after all.

Then you pay for it. By default the player who asked has to play a trump to that trick if they hold one, and only to that trick. It is the single forced play in the whole game, and it can catch you: you may be made to trump a trick your own partner was already winning.

So the question is never free. Ask on a trick with nothing in it and you have spent a trump to tell three other people what the suit is.

By default nobody is obliged to ask. A seat that would rather leave the suit alone plays any card it likes instead, the trump stays face down, and the deal carries on with four people guessing. A table can turn that off, and then the first seat that cannot follow has to declare whether it wants to or not.

Hold the king and the queen of the trump suit, both in your own hand, and you may show them on your turn once the trump has been turned up. Showing them moves the bidding side's target by four.

Down four if the bidding side shows the pair, up four if the defenders do. A contract of twenty is played for sixteen, or else for twenty four. The bar never goes below the lowest legal bid and never above the points on the table, so a pair shown against a contract of sixteen moves nothing at all. Nobody is given any points either: the cards are still worth twenty eight, and all that moved was the bar.

One hand has to hold both. A king with your partner and a queen with you is two cards and no pair, and a king you have already played is gone for good.

By default your side must have taken a trick since the trump came up before you can show them. A side that swept the first three tricks while the suit was still face down has shown nothing about trumps, which is what the condition is there for. Only one side shows the pair in a deal, and it is whichever gets there first.