Euchre
Also known as Eucre, Euker
- Players
- 3-6 players (best with 4)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck stripped to 24 cards (A, K, Q, J, 10, 9 in each suit)
- Time
- 20-40 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Trick-taking
Setup
Four players in two fixed partnerships, partners seated opposite each other. Strip a standard pack down to 24 cards: ace, king, queen, jack, ten and nine in each of the four suits. Nothing lower is used.
For the first dealer, turn cards face up one at a time around the table and give the deal to whoever receives the first black jack. After that the deal passes clockwise every hand.
Deal five cards to each player clockwise in two rounds, three to a player then two, or two then three. Whichever pattern you start with, keep it for the rest of that deal. That accounts for twenty cards. Stack the remaining four face down in the middle as the kitty and turn its top card face up. That upcard is the suit on offer in the first round of bidding.
Do not sort your hand yet, because ranking is not fixed until trump is settled. In the three plain suits cards run ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine from high to low. In trump the order is right bower (the jack of the trump suit, the best card in the deck), then left bower — the matching jack in the other suit of its colour — then ace, king, queen, ten, nine. The left bower does not merely rank as trump, it belongs to trump for the whole hand. With spades as trump the jack of clubs is a spade: you may not use it to follow a club lead, and you must play it to a spade lead if it is your only spade. The trump suit therefore holds seven cards and the same-color suit only five.
Keep score on paper, or with the traditional pair of spare low cards laid face down and turned to show the count.
Play
First round of bidding. The turned card offers its suit as trump. Starting on the dealer's left and going clockwise, everyone in turn either takes that offer or passes it along. Accepting is called ordering it up if you are one of the dealer's opponents, assisting if you are the dealer's partner, and taking it up if you are the dealer. As soon as somebody accepts, bidding stops: the dealer adds the upcard to hand and buries any one card face down under the kitty, going back to five cards. The side that chose trump are the makers, the other pair the defenders.
Second round of bidding. If all four pass, the dealer turns the upcard face down on the kitty and the auction goes round once more from the dealer's left. Now a player may pass or name any suit as trump except the suit just turned down. Naming the other suit of the same color is called next; naming either suit of the opposite color is cross, or green. Nobody exchanges cards in the second round, and the kitty is finished with. If all four pass again the hand is dead: throw the cards in and pass the deal. Under the very common stick-the-dealer rule the dealer is instead forced to name a suit rather than let the hand die.
Going alone. Once trump is settled and before a card is led, any player may declare a loner — the maker, or either defender. That player's partner lays all five cards face down and takes no part in the hand, so a lone maker plays one against two and a lone defender two against one. If both sides put somebody up alone, everybody else is out of it and the deal comes down to two players and ten cards. The declaration has to come before the opening lead; you cannot decide to go alone once play has started.
Playing the tricks. The player to the dealer's left leads to the first trick — except when somebody is playing alone, in which case the lead belongs to the player on the loner's left instead. Where both sides have gone alone, the defender leads. Each player in turn clockwise must follow the suit led if holding a card of it. A player who cannot follow may play anything at all, trump included. There is no obligation to trump and no obligation to beat what has already been played. A trump on the trick beats everything that is not one, and the biggest trump takes it. Untrumped, it falls to whoever played highest in the led suit. The winner of a trick leads to the next. Five tricks are played and the hand is then scored.
The bower trap. Two situations catch new players, and both come from the left bower changing suit. With hearts as trump, a diamond lead cannot be answered by the jack of diamonds at all: that card has become a heart. And when hearts are led, a player holding that same jack and nothing else red is not void after all — the jack is their heart, and down it goes.
Reneging. Failing to follow suit when you were able to is a renege. Club and tournament practice is to stop the hand the moment the fault is spotted and move 2 points — awarded to the innocent side, or deducted from the offenders, depending on the group. Casual tables more often finish the hand out and simply deny the offending side any score for it. Both are in use, so agree which applies before you deal.
Four of the twenty-four cards never reach a hand, so besides the upcard three cards stay unknown all deal. That, along with the dealer's buried discard, is what makes tracking the seven trump cards worth the effort.
Goal & scoring
A side wins by being first to 10 points. Points come only from the outcome of a hand; individual tricks are worth nothing on their own, and the defenders score nothing at all whenever the makers succeed.
Score at the end of each hand as follows:
- Makers win three or four tricks: 1 point.
- Makers win all five, called a march: 2 points.
- A lone maker wins three or four tricks: 1 point.
- A lone maker wins all five: 4 points.
- Makers win fewer than three tricks: they are euchred, and the defenders take 2 points.
- A lone defender euchres the makers: 4 points to the defenders.
Note the asymmetry on a loner. Going alone and succeeding pays two extra points, while going alone and failing costs nothing extra — a euchre pays 2 unless it was a lone defender who did the euchring. Note also that ordering up hands the makers all the risk: a euchre is worth as much as a march, which is why a side sitting on 8 or 9 points is dangerous to bid against.
Only one side can score in any given hand, so the two totals never advance together and there is no way for both sides to reach the target at once: the moment a side's total hits 10 the game stops and that side has won. No tie-break is needed.
Games are usually a race to 10. Playing to 11 is common in some regions, and league play sometimes uses a fixed number of hands with the higher total winning instead of a target score, in which case an equal total is normally settled by playing one more hand.
Variants
Stick the dealer — Also called screw the dealer. If the first three players pass in the second round of bidding, the dealer may not pass and must name one of the three eligible suits. It removes thrown-in hands entirely, speeds the game up, and creates the game's most reliable pressure point, since the dealer is often forced into a suit they would never have called voluntarily. Widespread enough that many tables treat it as standard rather than a variation.
Cutthroat (three-handed) Euchre — Three players, no partnerships, the same 24-card deck and the same five-card hands. Fifteen cards are dealt, the nine left over form the kitty, and its top card is turned up exactly as in the four-handed game. Whoever names trump plays alone against the other two, who cooperate for that hand only. The maker scores 1 point for three or four tricks and 3 points for all five, though some groups pay only 2 for the march; if the maker is euchred, each of the two defenders scores 2. First to 10 wins. The temporary alliances make it a very different bidding game from the partnership version.
The Benny (25-card Euchre) — A joker, sometimes replaced by the two of spades, is added to the deck as the Benny or best bower: the highest trump no matter which suit is trump. Holding it guarantees a trick. If the Benny is turned up as the upcard, the dealer names the trump suit. Common in Britain, Australia and parts of Canada, often alongside a target of 11 points rather than 10.
Bid Euchre — An auction version, usually with a larger deck (frequently 24 or 32 cards, or two packs combined for more players), in which players bid a specific number of tricks rather than simply accepting or naming trump. The high bidder names trump, and scoring is by tricks won rather than by the fixed 1, 2 and 4 point table. A side that fails to reach its bid loses points equal to the bid. It scales to five and six players more comfortably than standard Euchre.
No loner after passing — A restriction some tables put on going alone: a player who passed in the round that trump was eventually made in may not then play alone. It exists to stop somebody passing on a strong hand, waiting for an opponent to be talked into naming trump, and then going alone against them for the 4 points a lone euchre pays. Worth agreeing on, because without it the trap is available to anybody patient enough to use it.
Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, World Euchre Federation, Ohio Euchre, Trickster Cards.