The Tam Cúc card game, online, with friends or the computer

Tam Cúc rules, one round at a time

Vietnamese pages write bài tam cúc, bài meaning cards; English ones often drop the accents and write Tam Cuc or Bai Tam Cuc. The deck is 32 cards, sixteen red and sixteen black, matching the pieces of Chinese chess. Each colour has one general (tướng 將), two advisors (sĩ 士, called majors or scholars on some English pages), two elephants (tượng 象), two chariots (xe 車), two cannons (pháo 砲) and two horses (mã 馬). The soldiers, tốt 卒, come five to a colour. Rank decides, high to low in that order, and colour only breaks a tie inside a rank, red above black. So a black elephant beats a red cannon, and the red general, the tướng ông, is the best card in the deck.

The server shuffles the deck and deals every card, eight each at four seats. At three seats five cards come out first, both generals, one red advisor, one red soldier and one black soldier, and each seat gets nine. At two seats all 32 are dealt, sixteen each. The dealer of the first hand is drawn, the deal moves one seat on each hand after that, and the dealer is the House for the first round.

A round starts with the House, the cái. It lays a set face down and says how many cards it holds, from one to five. A set is a single card. Or a pair, two cards of one rank and colour, never two generals. Or a triple of one colour, in two kinds: general, advisor and elephant, or chariot, cannon and horse. Or four soldiers of one colour, or five. Three soldiers are not a triple. Every other seat then lays exactly the number called, face down: either a real set it hopes is stronger, or spare cards it wants gone.

Now the House turns its set over. The other seats go in turn, once each: show a stronger set of the same size, so a pair meets a pair and a triple meets a triple, or hide yours unseen. Only the House cannot hide. Whoever holds the best set keeps their own cards as points, not the ones the others laid, and becomes the House for the next round, so the lead changes hands. Every other card laid goes out of play, and a hidden set is never seen by anyone, not even after the hand.

Where Tam Cúc comes from, and which rules we follow

It is a Northern game and a Tết game: both Wikipedias say so, and the Vietnamese one adds that people in the Red River delta play while the bánh chưng cooks. The name, 三菊, means three chrysanthemums. Poets wrote about it, Hoàng Cầm among them. The World of Playing Cards shows a 32-card set used in Cochinchina, printed in Marseille around 1870. Pagat files it as trick-taking and points to a 1997 article by Jude Wudarczyk that we could not find online, so we have not read it.

Nobody agrees on every rule, so we picked one reading and say so. The first round has a ceiling, and Vietnamese Wikipedia sets it at red elephant for two or four seats and red chariot for three. So do we. Gamevh, a Vietnamese online games site, and one English travel guide name the red chariot without tying it to the table size. The bonus amounts are gamevh’s too, the only full table we found for two, three and four seats, and Vietnamese Wikipedia’s examples are smaller for the pair and the triple. Three seats deal 27 cards, one of the two English readings; the other takes out one red and one black soldier and deals 30. The deal moves on one seat a hand, as English Wikipedia and the Plum Seed allow.

Some pages describe a different game under the same name. One forum answer in the search results says to split the deck between two people and send out one card each per turn. That is not what the Vietnamese sources describe, and it is not what this table deals. Tiến lên, the Vietnamese climbing game, is another game again: you beat the last play or pass.

Tam Cúc instructions by example: a round at four seats

You are the House and you hold a pair of black horses. You lay them face down and say two. The three other seats lay two cards each, face down. You turn yours over: black horses. The next seat shows a pair of red cannons. Cannon is above horse, so the red cannons are the best set now and your horses go face up, out of play. The third seat only laid spare cards, so it hides them. The fourth laid black cannons, a real pair, but red beats black inside a rank, so it cannot show, and it hides too. The seat with the red cannons keeps those two cards as points and leads next.

In our opinion the good part is the laying. You commit before you know what is coming, so a pair of black horses is only a good call when nobody at the table holds a pair above it.

The count against par, the bonus, and how a match ends

Every seat lays the same number of cards every round, so every hand empties together. At four seats that is eight cards each, and par is two, an even share. Each seat counts the cards it won against par. More than par scores the difference, fewer loses it, so five of the eight cards against one each for the others is plus three and three times minus one. Par is three at three seats and eight at two.

Then the bonus, which only counts in the last round, and only when the House wins that round with a low set. There are three kinds. Kết đôi is a pair of chariots, cannons, horses or red soldiers. Kết ba is the chariot, cannon and horse of one colour. Kết Tốt đen is a pair of black soldiers, or four or five of them. When one lands, every other seat loses the bonus in points, less one point for each card it won, never below nothing, and the House gains all of it. That replaces the plain count for the hand.

Đè is the sting. Say a House calls black soldiers as its last set and a red soldier set of the same size beats it. The House loses 16 points less one for each card it won, the seat with the red soldiers gains them, and everybody else scores nothing. At four seats kết đôi is worth 4, kết ba 6, kết Tốt đen 8 and đè 16. A House that wins the last round with a pair of black horses while the others have won 2, 3 and 1 cards takes 2, 1 and 3 points from them, 6 in all.

A match is a set number of hands, a multiple of the seat count so every seat opens the same number: eight at four seats, nine at three, six at two. The host can pick short or long instead, or plain, which turns kết and đè off. Highest total wins, and a tie for first is shared.

Playing Tam Cúc online: what this table does

Against the computer you take one seat and choose one, two or three computers, named Robin, Sage and Kit, three to start with. Pause holds them, and otherwise they act a little under a second apart. With friends, start a table, choose two, three or four seats and send each seat its own link. Chat is always on, voice if the host switches it on, and every seat is a person: there are no computers at a shared table. If somebody does not turn up, the host can start short-handed and the table becomes that size.

The server shuffles the deck and deals, and it keeps the secrets. Your hand is on your screen. Another seat’s hand, a set that is still face down and a set that was hidden never reach anyone else’s screen.

The cards are drawn for this table and carry the Chinese character and the Vietnamese name but no number, so the board keeps a rank ladder and a list of the sets beside them. Each card in your hand has a corner chip with its rank and an R or a B, so red and black are never told apart by ink alone, and there is a high contrast switch. When a card or a button is off, the board says why in words.

It is free. An ad may show up once in a while, and we will do our best to keep it discreet. Tam Cúc is here because we mean to have every game that can be played with a pack of cards, and a pack of chess pieces counts. There is surely a Tam Cúc app somewhere, but here you make no account and download nothing: just open the page and send your friends a link. The best game with friends is one where you all know the rules, or none of you does, and if nobody has met Tam Cúc before, this is that game. A computer match is not saved, so leaving the page ends it, and a table you share waits 48 hours for the others and then goes. Only the number of computers and the contrast switch are remembered, on your device.

How the computer plays, and what it cannot see

The computer sees what any seat would see: its own cards and whatever has been turned face up. Another seat’s hand, laid set or hidden cards are closed to it. To choose a call, it deals the unseen cards out at random 25 times and counts the deals in which nobody could beat a candidate set. Whichever set promises the most cards at the best odds wins the call, with a small preference for holding back its strongest cards, and in the last round a kết gets extra weight.

Laying is a simple rule. If the count says its best real set of that size wins at least half the time, that set goes down. Otherwise the cards it values least do. Showing is simpler still: it shows whenever it is allowed, which is a tell you can use, because a computer that hides could not beat the set. It runs on the same rules code as a shared table, so it cannot deal, score or end a hand differently from a person.

What is left out

Not here: đi đêm, the secret swap of cards between two seats that some tables allow, and the two extra sets some tables count, two pairs and two triples. There is no fifth seat either, because none of the sources plays past four. The rules above are the whole game as we deal it.