An ungainly but beautiful bird, the good luck of a ship until someone fucks it up, and early in the alphabet? Why is that a card game.
It is an extension of bridge to five or more players. Not the only way of doing it, but there were no obvious intermediaries between them.
The pack is divided between the players. Two non-adjacent players will form a partnership, all the others the opposition. The first player bids how many tricks with what suit as trumps she thinks she could make. A later player may accept this, which is equivalent to a bid in bridge, in that all further acceptances (and hence, de facto, bids also) must be of a higher contract, and if no-one does, that is the contract played.
Also: for the first round, you can only bid, not accept; after the first round you can't bid a suit if you could accept in that suit, except by accepting and bidding higher in that suit at once.
For instance, a contrived simple example:
I enjoyed it. I learnt bridge for a while, but didn't have a good memory, and was plunged into non-natural bidding systems too soon. I had some of the problems here, but not as much because the conventions aren't as well established. Almost all the bids are natural, and the system encourages that.
A decent scoring system needs to be devised. Desirable is that making a contract is best, you're almost never incentivised to accept a contract to screw the player who made it (maybe rules could be tweaked), and it's good to try to compete to make a contract but not normally to make one you expect to lose[1]. These may or may not be compatible. In bridge, scoring below the line (which gives you more points in circumstances) incentivises making contracts, but that couldn't be adapted straight.
[1] Cf. dollar auction. If you auction a dollar, but require that the second-last bid also pays, everyone has an incentive to bid up when the bid is less than $1, but when someone's bid $0.98 and someone else $0.99, the runner-up is better off bidding $1, losing nothing, rather than losing $0.02. And so on, until someone cuts their losses. It's not a real auction, but it happens in real life. It doesn't happen here, because once someone's bid a losing contract to prevent a big winning one, no-one else's incentivised to prevent that. But it's still not quite in the spirit of the thing.
Another nice innovation is Excuses (Jokers) which make the pack up to a multiple of the number of players, and can be played instead of following suit, changing the game little, but making it harder to draw anything out.
[Edit: shop->ship and fix width]
It is an extension of bridge to five or more players. Not the only way of doing it, but there were no obvious intermediaries between them.
The pack is divided between the players. Two non-adjacent players will form a partnership, all the others the opposition. The first player bids how many tricks with what suit as trumps she thinks she could make. A later player may accept this, which is equivalent to a bid in bridge, in that all further acceptances (and hence, de facto, bids also) must be of a higher contract, and if no-one does, that is the contract played.
Also: for the first round, you can only bid, not accept; after the first round you can't bid a suit if you could accept in that suit, except by accepting and bidding higher in that suit at once.
For instance, a contrived simple example:
1 2 3 4 5
- 2C 1S 1C - 1S < 1C, but that's ok as it hasn't been accepted.
#2 thinks he can make 2 tricks out of his hand, etc
- a3C - a - #2 accepts 1C and bids 3C, expecting 2 tricks from
- - - his hand, and one from #4. #4 accepts this. Normally
bidding would go higher, as a match is more valuble.
I enjoyed it. I learnt bridge for a while, but didn't have a good memory, and was plunged into non-natural bidding systems too soon. I had some of the problems here, but not as much because the conventions aren't as well established. Almost all the bids are natural, and the system encourages that.
A decent scoring system needs to be devised. Desirable is that making a contract is best, you're almost never incentivised to accept a contract to screw the player who made it (maybe rules could be tweaked), and it's good to try to compete to make a contract but not normally to make one you expect to lose[1]. These may or may not be compatible. In bridge, scoring below the line (which gives you more points in circumstances) incentivises making contracts, but that couldn't be adapted straight.
[1] Cf. dollar auction. If you auction a dollar, but require that the second-last bid also pays, everyone has an incentive to bid up when the bid is less than $1, but when someone's bid $0.98 and someone else $0.99, the runner-up is better off bidding $1, losing nothing, rather than losing $0.02. And so on, until someone cuts their losses. It's not a real auction, but it happens in real life. It doesn't happen here, because once someone's bid a losing contract to prevent a big winning one, no-one else's incentivised to prevent that. But it's still not quite in the spirit of the thing.
Another nice innovation is Excuses (Jokers) which make the pack up to a multiple of the number of players, and can be played instead of following suit, changing the game little, but making it harder to draw anything out.
[Edit: shop->ship and fix width]