If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Bezique is the most convoluted, complicated card game known to humankind. Although, having said that, when you get going it’s not so bad.

Viv taught me. She was taught by my grandmother, and it was my grandmother’s set, with the 50 year old scoring dials, that she used to teach me last night. It was like coming full circle. If I remember correctly, it goes something like this:

You both take a hand of eight cards, dealt out three-two-three. You then turn over the top of the remaining pile to decide the trump and start play. The non-dealer lays a card from their hand, and the dealer then lays one of their own. They don’t have to try and win, and neither do they have to follow suit, so they can in effect throw away useless cards.

However, what they do want to do is win a trick so that they can then declare a scoring meld, such as a royal marriage (king and queen of the trump suit) or common marriage (any matching king and queen of a non-trump suit), four royal cards of different suits, a bezique (rather confusingly a Jack of diamonds combined with a Queen of spades) and so on.

There is nothing below a seven in the pack, so you also get points for laying a seven of the trump suit, and when you get to the end you count up the number of tens and aces you have in the pile of cards you picked up from winning hands earlier in the game.

After every round of two cards is played, the winner of that hand picks up the top unturned card from the pile in the middle of the table, and the loser picks up the card below, thus both replenishing the eight cards in their hand.

Aces score high; tens come next. After that follow the King, Queen, Knave, nine, eight and seven.

Yes. All terribly confusing when you see it written down, and no less confusing when explained orally, so you really need to play it to see how it works.

Churchill was apparently an avid player, although as Wikipedia explains, ’since the nineteenth century the game has declined in popularity and is now played rarely in English-speaking countries’.

Don’t know why.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.