Posted 5:18 PM by Floyd

If bridge is the queen of all card games, then Barbu is the crazed, perverted jester. I am going to play in a duplicate Barbu tournament tomorrow, and I played a practice session with some friends last night.

Barbu is actually a collection of card games that are scored together. There are four players. There are slight variations in the game; in the version that I am playing tomorrow, there are seven games. There are seven rounds, with four deals in a round. Each player deals seven times and must call each game once.

All but one of the games are "trick-taking" games like bridge; most have no trump, as in hearts. Many games are about not taking certain types of cards. For instance, in Queens you don't want to take any queens; each one you take is 6 points off your score.
An even more drastically simple game is Barbu: Don't take the king of hearts. (Barbu is French for "bearded", and the heart king has a beard.) Then there is a hearts-like game: Each heart is -2, with the heart ace -6. There is no queen of spades in the Barbu hearts game. In Trumps you name a trump suit, and score 5 points for each trick you take.

Other games are stranger. In Last Two you do not want to take the last two tricks. Games like Queens and Hearts tend to punish you for holding good hands; the more high cards you have, the more tricks there are for you to collect hearts or queens. But Last Two is not necessarily a game for bad hands. For instance, you could hold 853 KJ95 932 T54 and follow suit as the spades, diamonds, and clubs are stripped -- then ace and a heart stuffs you for the last two.

A very weird game is Ravage City. You play out a hand, notrump style, then examine your discards. Whoever has the largest number of cards in any one suit is the loser. Usually it is death to take two tricks in one suit, because that's an eight-card holding. But taking one trick in each suit is safe.

The seventh game is a non-trick-taking game called FanTan. It's kind of a mutual solitaire game. The dealer calls a base card, say a six. You can play sixes, or cards that are adjacent to cards already played. (Suits matter; there are four piles, one for each suit.) The object is to play all the cards in your hand.

After the dealer names his game the other players can double the dealer, or other players. Players who are doubled may redouble. If you double someone, there is a side bet between the two of you equal to the difference between your scores. For instance, say we are playing Queens and I double you. If I take one queen and you take two, the double makes it as if I took none and you took three. If you redoubled, it would double the difference; I would be scored for "minus one" queen, and you would be stuck with four.

All players must double each dealer twice! In last night's game I was timid about doubling dealers, and was forced to double people at the end of the game. This would not always be fatal, because the last deal gives you no choice of games -- you call whatever game is left to you. But my friends got dealt good hands for the games they had to call, redoubled me, and beat me like a red-headed stepchild.

Here are some webbed pages on Barbu. I mentioned that there are variations; it seems like everyone's rules and scoring are different.

• Jeff Goldsmith's barbu page
  
• Barbu page at pagat.com
  

I noticed while Googling that a Paul Barbu was a litigant againt the Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. I don't know if he has a beard.