Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
A trick taking card game in which players score for winning aces and 10s in tricks, and for forming certain combinations of cards from tricks won and cards in hand.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
A trick taking card game in which players score for winning aces and 10s in tricks, and for forming certain combinations of cards from tricks won and cards in hand. Point-scoring combinations include four of a kind (aces, kings, queens and jacks only), a marriage (king and queen of same suit), sequence (A-10 of trump) or a Bezique (queen of spades and jack of diamonds). Bezique uses a subset of the standard playing cards, composed of the seven through Ace taken from two decks (i.e. the deck contains no deuces through sixes, with all other cards appearing twice). A game of Bezique goes through three distinct stages or "phases" of play, and is somewhat reminiscent of cribbage and canasta. Bezique is the ancestor of Pinochle, and that game's two-handed version is very similar to Bezique but with slightly different deck and slightly different scoring. (The origin date listed for this game is approximate.)