Origin France Players 2-4 Age range 8-80 | Type Trick-taking Skills required Skilful Cards 32 | |
Coinche ([kwɛ̃ʃ]), also called belote coinchée ([bəlɔt kwɛ̃ʃe]), is a variant of the French belote. The rules of the game are the same, but there are differences in how cards are dealt and how trumps are chosen.
Contents
Like most popular games, coinche rules may differ from a geographic area to another.
Dealing
The deck is never shuffled, but rather cut by the player who precedes the dealer, except for the first dealing in a game when the dealer's partner does that. The first dealing in a game is done by the winners from the previous game. At least three cards must be cut. The cards are dealt counter-clockwise starting from the dealer's successor (to his/her right), each player receives three packets of cards, two of them count three cards and the other two cards. The order in which the packets are dealt is not specified, it could be (3,2,3), (2,3,3) or (3,3,2).
Bidding
The player at the right of the dealer starts the biddings, the goal here is to choose the trumps.
Each player can :
Card Suits are the same as in belote :
All trumps and No trumps are added.
Biddings start at least at 80 points, which is about half of the total points (162), and are made by steps of 10 (80, 90, 100, ...). If a contract has already been made by another player, the new contract must be at least 10 points higher.
An important rule of the game is the possibility of "coincher": when player A makes a contract, if player B thinks player A will not make it, then B can say "coinché" as long as no newer contracts are made. In this case the winning team points are doubled. In the same way A can "sur-coincher", points will then be quadrupled.
Biddings end by one of those 2 cases :