Bisque
Designed by Daniël Muilwijk
Players 3
Length ?
Extra Material None

A trick-taking game for 3 players.

Introduction

Three chefs in one kitchen, that can’t be good. They all want to make soup, even though there’s only one kettle available. Stubborn as they are they all start to work on the same soup. To make things worse, all chefs have a very personal taste. During the process each chef tries to squeeze in as much of their own preferences as they possibly can. After the soup is done, the personal taste of each chef is revealed and it is evaluated which chef has managed to add his own flair and ingredients the most.

Overview

In Bisque every player secretly selects a goal card from his hand to declare which suits he wants to end up in the soup pot. With the rest of the cards tricks are played and the winner of each tricks decides which card will end up in the soup pot. After all the tricks the suits in the soup pot are scored. The goal cards are revealed and the winner of the round is declared.

Setup

The game uses the basic Decktet only. If you have an extended Decktet, remove the pawn.png's, the court.png's and the Excuse.

Deal

Shuffle the deck and deal it out evenly to the players. Every player should have twelve cards. There should be no remaining cards.

Goal Cards

Every player picks a double suited card from his hand (no Ace or crown.png) and puts it in front of him, face down. These are called goal cards. The suits on a goal card determines which cards a player wants to end up in the score pile; these are called goal suits.

In the extremely rare case a player is only holding single suited cards, a redeal takes place.

Rank

The rank of the cards is as usual: Ace 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 crown.png.

Game Play

The player on the dealer’s left leads to the first trick. Clockwise around the table, each player plays a card to the trick. You don’t have to follow suit, you’re allowed to play any card in your hand.

The highest ranked card played to the trick wins the trick. When two equally ranked cards are played to a trick, the first played is higher than the second.

The winner of the trick picks one of the two cards the other players played to the trick. The picked card is put aside, face up, to form the soup pot. Take in mind that this soup pot is not owned by any player, it is a communal soup pot instead. The other cards played to the trick, including the winning card, are discarded and thus put aside face down.

The winner of a trick leads to the next. After each trick a card is added to the soup pot. All the cards in the soup pot should be visible for all players at all times.

Play continues until players have no cards remaining.

Scoring

Every player reveals their goal card. The goal card depicts two suits and for each of them a score is calculated.

For every matching Ace in the soup pot 5 points is added to the score of that suit, for a matching number card as many points are added as is depicted on the card and for a matching Crown 10 points are added.

Every player compares the scores of both their goal suits. The lower score is the score for that player in that round.

Game

It is advised to play six hands. Points are accumulated. The player with the highest score wins the game. If multiple people have the highest score, there are multiple winners.

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