The Skruuvi card game, online, with friends or computers

What Skruuvi is, and where it came from

Skruuvi is a partnership bidding game for four, played with one ordinary 52-card pack and no dummy: all four play their own hands. John McLeod's rules page files it under auction whist and calls it a distant relative of Bridge that adds misère bids, a contract to lose tricks, and cards passed between partners. If you come from Bridge, that is the shape of it: no dummy, partners that change, and a kitty with passing that Bridge does not have.

Vint reached Finland in the 19th century, and Finland's living heritage wiki dates the first Skruuvi guidebook to 1895, in Turku. It says the Helsinki Finnish Club has played the game since the club was founded in 1876, and that Minna Canth, the writer, was a known player. So was Professor Arvo Ylppö, who kept playing past his hundredth birthday. It is still played, at clubs and at home.

Twelve deals, three sets, a new partner each set

Four seats, two partnerships, partners across from each other. The partnerships do not last. After each set of deals the seats change, so that over a session you partner each of the others exactly once. A full session is 24 deals. We deal the shorter form McLeod also gives: 12 deals, three sets of four, each set two Kitty games and then two Kotka games. The highest total at the end wins.

There are three kinds of deal. A Kitty game deals twelve cards to each seat and four face down in the middle. A Kotka game, named for the city of Kotka, deals all 52 cards and has no kitty, and the bidding starts at level six. If all four seats pass at their first turn, the hand becomes an all-pass misère, where each trick and each ace your side takes costs it points.

A Kitty game: bid, take the kitty, pass, raise, double

A bid is a level from one to seven and a denomination. Low to high, they run misère, spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts, grand. Grand is no trumps, and misère is a contract to lose tricks. In trumps or grand a bid promises six tricks plus the level: five hearts is a promise to win eleven, with hearts as trumps. A misère promises at most seven minus the level, so six misère allows one trick. The dealer bids first and the bidding goes round the table. Each bid must beat the last. Once someone has bid, the auction ends after eight passes in a row. You can open low, but the contract has to end at level five or higher.

Then the cards move. The kitty bidder shows the four kitty cards to everyone, takes them, and passes any four cards face down to their partner. The partner passes three on: one back to the kitty bidder, one to each opponent. Everyone is back to a hand of thirteen. What crosses the table face down stays face down, and only the seat it is passed to sees it.

Now the bidding side has a second round of bidding, on its own, and a kitty bid below level five has to be raised. If the kitty bid was below level six, the opponents may swap one card. After that the opponents may double, which doubles the score, and the bidding side may redouble, which triples it.

Two tips from McLeod's page, not from us. It is usually best for the partner with the weaker trumps to be the kitty bidder, so that every trump can be passed to one hand. And when the opponents swap a card, they will often pass the highest card of their shortest suit in a trump game, and in a misère the lowest card of their shortest suit, or the ace of it if they have one.

Play and scoring, with a worked example

The seat to the left of the declarer leads. Follow suit if you can, otherwise play anything. The highest trump takes the trick, or else the highest card of the suit led, and whoever took it leads next.

Scores depend on the level. In trumps or grand, a made contract scores 25 at level five, 35 at level six and 50 at level seven. In misère it is 10, 20 and 35. Each trick over the contract adds 2 at levels five and six. A failed contract scores nothing for the contract. The first undertrick costs 5, 10 or 15 in trumps or grand, and 10, 15 or 20 in misère, then 5 for each one after.

A worked example. Your side takes the kitty auction and ends on five hearts. The opponents double. You take all thirteen tricks. You promised eleven, so the contract is worth 25, and the two extra tricks add 2 each: 25 plus 4 is 29. The double makes that 58. That is the result for your side, plus 58, and minus 58 for the other side.

Misère has one more cost, the aces. Every ace a side takes costs it the trick number, so an ace in the fourth trick costs 4, and no double touches that. It is why a misère is about dumping aces on the other side. At the end of a set every seat adds the result to its running total: partners add their side, opponents subtract it. The four totals always add up to zero.

Which Skruuvi this is, and what we left out

This table follows McLeod's page, which is based on the Helsinki Finnish Club's 2016 handbook, and its modern scoring table. It is not the only Skruuvi. McLeod also prints the older scoring, with different numbers and a redouble that multiplies by four, and that is not here. A Finnish site, korttipeliopas.fi, describes the modern game of Hannu Taskinen's book and scores it differently again: a failed misère counts no aces, for one.

We do not deal Bolshevik, the option where one seat plays a level seven contract alone against the other three, and we do not deal the 24-deal session. We leave out the signalling conventions too. On McLeod's page the order of the cards in a passed packet can say something to your partner. At this table the packet is a set of cards and its order says nothing.

Where the page is silent or unclear we made calls. The opponents' swap depends on the level of the kitty bid, which fits McLeod's remark that a bid at level six prevents the opponents from exchanging. A pass that would end the second auction below level five is refused, and the defender who would start the swap may decline it. In an all-pass misère the four card passes go one at a time and the first double ends the asking, and every seat deals once a set. McLeod's table does not say how overtricks count in a misère, so here each trick below your allowance counts as an overtrick. Each deal comes to one signed result for a side: the contract score, minus the aces it took, plus the aces the other side took.

We want every game you can play with a deck of cards at this table eventually, so Skruuvi was always going on the list. In our opinion the best game with friends is the one where you all know the rules, or none of you does. Odds are this is the second kind.

At the table: three friends, or three computers

With friends, press Play with three friends and send three links, one per seat. The seats are named the host and guest one to three, chat is on, and voice is there only if the host switched it on. There is no computer seat in a room: four seats are four people. Once somebody has sat down, the table stays open until 48 hours after the last move, and you can come back to it from the same page.

On your own, Play the computer seats you with three computers called Aino, Eero and Kalle. Partners rotate there too, so each of them is your partner for a set. It is a rough opponent. It bids trump contracts only, and only on a strong hand, never misère or grand. Left to themselves the computers pass most deals, which then play as all-pass misères, and any other misère is yours to bid. It doubles a contract when its own estimate says the contract fails, and it never redoubles. It leads aces, and kings once the ace has gone, wins a trick with the lowest card that wins it, and in a misère it ducks and throws its high cards, aces onto the other side's tricks. Pause computers holds them while you think.

Nothing is saved. New session deals a fresh twelve, and a closed tab is a finished session, though the high-contrast switch is remembered on your device. Colour never carries meaning alone: every suit is a symbol as well as a colour, bids name their suit in words, and your partner is named on the board, not just tinted. There is surely an app somewhere, but this is a web page, free, with an ad now and then that we will try to keep discreet.