Fire and Rain

2+ Players - Trick-taking Spades-like

This Spades-like game includes dynamic trump suits and chance tiebreakers for added fun and challenge!

Instead of dealing the entire deck, deal only 13 cards to each player. For a short game, play to 200 points; 500 for a longer one.

Flip the top card of the deck to reveal the starting “Trump” suit. Each player “bids” on the number of tricks they expect to win in the round, starting with the left of the dealer.

After bids are made, play starts from the left of the dealer and rotates clockwise for each trick completed. The leading player chooses a card, and all following players must follow suit if possible. If you cannot follow suit, you may choose, instead, to break suit by playing the active trump suit (which becomes the active suit for the hand) or discard a card. Since there are multiple numbers of the same suit, there can be ties, which will force a tie-breaker card to be drawn. Replace the trump card with the top card of the deck until one of the competing cards match the border of the new card. The player with the matching border wins the trick, and the tie-breaker card becomes the new trump suit.

Scoring follows traditional spades rules; if you make the contract by winning at least the number of tricks indicated in your bid, you get 10 points per trick up to your bid, plus 1 point for each “overtrick”. If you get 10 overtricks at any point in the game, the player loses 100 points.

For advanced players, you can track players who renege on their contract - for instance, players may not open with a trump suit unless it is the only suit in their hand OR a player discarded or broke suit while having a card of the leading suit in their hand. If a player is caught reneging (this can be discovered after a few tricks), you may choose to penalize the player by adding to their contract requirement or forfeiting their bid entirely for the round. This penalty should be decided at the beginning of the game.