Sueca rules

Portugal's national card game, and the one played in every café in the country. Four players in partnerships, forty cards, and no bidding to slow it down.

The deck

40 cards — the 52-card deck without eights, nines and tens. Ten cards each, and the whole deck is dealt.

Partners sit facing each other. In Portugal the game goes anticlockwise: the deal and the play both pass to the right.

The ranking

Ace, seven, king, jack, queen, six, five, four, three, two. Both the seven above the king and the jack above the queen are surprises worth memorising before you sit down.

Card values

Ace 11, seven 10, king 4, jack 3, queen 2, and the rest nothing. 120 points in the deck.

The trump

The dealer's last card is dealt face up, and its suit is trump. The dealer takes it into hand.

Some tables turn the dealer's first card instead. Either way, everyone at the table knows one of the dealer's cards for the whole hand.

The play

The player to the dealer's right leads. You must follow suit if you can; if you cannot, you may play anything, including a trump but without any obligation to. Highest trump wins, otherwise the highest card of the suit led.

The winner of each trick leads to the next, and after ten tricks the partnerships count their cards.

Scoring

Count the card points your partnership took.

61 to 90 points: 1 game point. 91 to 119: 2 game points. All 120: 4 game points. 60 each: nobody scores.

A match is usually first to 4 game points.

An example

Your side takes the ace and seven of trumps, two other aces and a scattering of court cards, for 74 points. The other side has 46. You score one game point.

No talking, no signalling, and no looking at tricks already taken. Sueca is played fast and strictly, and the whole skill is in reading your partner's discards.

Playing well

The ace and seven of each suit are 21 of its 30 points, so the tricks that matter are the ones those two cards fall in. Keep track of which sevens have gone: a king is only safe to lead once the ace and seven of its suit are out.