Mus

Also known as Musa

Players

4 players

Deck

1 standard deck stripped to 40 cards (8s, 9s and 10s removed), or a 40-card Spanish pack

Time

45-90 minutes

Difficulty

Complex

Category

Bluffing

Setup

Mus is a four-player partnership game and that is the version everyone means by the name. Partners sit opposite one another so the two sides alternate round the table.

Use a forty-card Spanish pack, or an ordinary pack with the eights, nines and tens taken out, jack standing for the sota, queen for the caballo and king for the rey. Suits do not matter anywhere in the game — there are no flushes, no trumps, and nothing that asks what suit a card is.

Two ranks are impostors, and this single rule shapes almost everything else. Threes play exactly as kings and twos play exactly as aces, in all four betting rounds and for every purpose. The pack therefore behaves as though it holds eight kings and eight aces with only six ranks in between, which makes the highest and lowest cards common enough to fight over and the middle of the pack nearly worthless.

Choose a first dealer at random. The dealer gives four cards to each player one at a time, going anticlockwise, and the rest of the pack stays face down within reach. The player on the dealer's right is the mano: first to speak in every round and the winner of every tie. The dealer is the postre and always speaks last. Both roles move one seat to the right after each hand.

Score with small stones or beans, one pile per side. Points are called stones and five of them make an amarraco — hamarreko in Basque, a word that means a unit of ten rather than of five. The version described here runs to forty stones, eight amarracos. Thirty is the commoner target across most of Spain and forty the northern one, so agree which before the first deal. Twenty-two counters between the two sides cover a forty-point game, because no side ever has more than seven amarracos and four loose stones in front of it at once.

Play

Mus runs in two phases: a public negotiation about whether to redraw, then four separate betting rounds fought over the same four cards.

The discard. Beginning with the mano and going anticlockwise, each player says mus or no hay mus. Only if all four say mus does anything happen: everyone then throws out between one and four cards face down — accounts differ on whether you may agree to mus and then keep all four — and the dealer replaces them from the stock, mano first. The question then comes round again, and there is no limit to how many times it can. The instant one player says no hay mus the discarding is over for that hand and the betting starts. If the stock runs short mid-replacement, shuffle the discards to make a new one — leaving out the discards of the player who is still owed cards, if only one player is short. Note what the question costs you: agreeing to mus tells three other people that what you were dealt is not good enough to keep, and refusing tells them that it is. Speaking first means giving that away first.

Signalling. Partners are allowed, and expected, to tell each other what they hold. The vocabulary is a fixed set of facial signals made across the table while the opponents watch for them: biting the lower lip is two kings, showing the tip of the tongue is two aces, raised eyebrows are duples, a wink is thirty-one, closed eyes are a hand with nothing in it at all. Lists vary by region and clubs publish their own, so settle which are in use before the first deal. What does not vary is the discipline. A signal has to be true: signing a holding you do not have is cheating, and so is inventing a sign the table has not agreed to. All the deception in mus happens in the betting; none of it happens in the signs. A sign may be made at any point in the hand, and catching an opponent mid-signal is a legitimate and much-enjoyed part of playing.

The four rounds. Grande, chica, pares and juego are played in that fixed order, each finished before the next begins.

• Grande is a contest for the highest cards. Compare best card against best card; if those match, compare the second, then the third, then the fourth.
• Chica is the same contest inverted, looking for the lowest hand and comparing from the bottom up.
• Pares is for matched ranks. Everybody first declares truthfully whether they hold anything at all, and only those who do take any part in the round. Two pairs (duples) beat three alike (medias), which beat a single pair (pares); inside a class the higher ranks win, and duples are compared on the better pair first and then on the other. Four alike has no name of its own and just counts as duples of that rank, so four sotas lose to a caballo pair alongside a pair of fives.
• Juego is for a hand whose four cards total thirty-one or more. Again everybody declares yes or no first. If nobody has juego, the round is played as punto instead — a contest for the highest total below thirty-one.

When a declaration round has nobody to argue with. If only one side declares for pares, or only one side for juego, there is nothing to bet against: that side takes the round outright and simply collects for what it holds. If nobody declares pares, the round is skipped and nobody scores from it at all. If nobody declares juego, the round is not skipped: punto is played in its place, betting and all.

Betting a round. The mano speaks first and each player in turn passes or bets. A bet is a number of stones, two at the minimum, and naming no number means two. Opponents may fold, accept, or raise. Folding closes the round with nothing shown and pays at once: one stone if the refused call was the first bet of the round, otherwise the amount of the bet that was standing before it. Refuse a raise to twenty made over a bet of four and you pay four — not one, and not twenty. Accepting leaves the stake on the table to be settled when the cards come up. If all four pass, the round is still compared at the showdown and pays one stone to the better hand.

Ordago. In place of any bet or raise, a player may say ordago: an offer to settle the entire game on that one round. Refused, it pays like any other refusal: one stone if it was the first call of the round, otherwise the bet it was raised over. Accepted, all four hands go face up immediately and whoever wins that round wins the game outright, whatever the score happened to be.

The showdown. When the fourth round is over the hands are revealed and the rounds settled in the order they were played. A tie goes to whichever of the tied players sits nearest the mano, counting the mano first and then round anticlockwise — so the mano wins every tie and the postre loses every tie, while the two players in between beat each other in seating order rather than by side.

Goal & scoring

A game is a race to forty stones and counters change hands twice over at the end of every hand.

First the stakes. Whichever side wins a round takes whatever was accepted on it. A round that was bet and then folded has already paid the bettor one stone during the betting and is never compared or shown, which is why folding cheaply on grande with a hand you intend to win chica with is an ordinary piece of play rather than a surrender. The one thing a refusal does not cancel is the pares and juego bonuses: the side whose bet went unanswered still won that round, so it still collects for the combinations its two members hold, and shows them to claim them. A round everybody passed on is still compared at the showdown and pays one stone to the better hand.

Then the combinations, and this is the part newcomers miss entirely. Pares and juego pay for the holding itself on top of any stake, and both members of the winning side collect for their own hands separately. A partnership that takes the pares round holding a pair on one side and three alike on the other is paid for both, so a strong hand can be worth several stones with nobody having bet a thing. The scale pays most for what is hardest to hold, and juego is not ranked by size — thirty-one exactly is the best hand there is, and a hand of forty loses to one of thirty-two.

Counting. Five stones make an amarraco, usually shown by swapping five small counters for a large one, and eight amarracos — forty stones — win the game. Reaching seven of them obliges you to say dentro, warning the other side aloud that you are within five stones of the finish. A side that crosses forty stops the hand immediately, in the middle of a round if that is where it happens, so the order the rounds are settled in decides some games on its own. The best of three games is a vaca and three vacas usually take the match, though plenty of tables stop at the first vaca and call that the match.

The ordago is what all of this is really for. Because a single round can be made to carry the whole game, the ordinary stones are a currency you are spending to find out how your opponents behave, and the hand where you finally call one is meant to be the hand where you already know.

Variants

Four kings (a cuatro reyes) — In Navarre, La Rioja and parts of the Basque Country the game keeps its older form: the same forty cards, but threes and twos counting as themselves rather than as kings and aces. The pack then holds four kings and four aces, the ranking runs rey, caballo, sota, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, ace, and in the juego a three is worth three points and a two is worth two. Good hands become much rarer, which is the whole point of it — less rides on being dealt an unbeatable hand and more on the betting. The ciego sign for a hopeless hand is generally not recognised in this version, and the four-king pack tends to travel with the forty-point game as the eight-king pack travels with the thirty-point one.

Game length and vacas — Thirty stones is the standard target across most of Spain and forty the northern one. Matches are variously the best of three games, three vacas of three games each, or five games and five vacas. It is worth agreeing before the first deal, because the target changes how reckless an ordago is: staking a game you are two stones from winning is a different proposition from staking one you have barely begun.

Restricted or banned signalling — Published lists of the signs do not agree with one another and none of them claims to be complete — one has a single shrug for a punto of thirty where another distinguishes thirty, twenty-nine and twenty-eight by which shoulder is lifted. Navarre is one of many places where no signs at all are allowed in a game's opening hand. Since the entire balance of the game rests on how much information a partnership can move across the table under the opponents' noses, agreeing the list is the thing most worth doing before you sit down.

Three, five and six players — Three or five play Encaje, also called Mus Francés: the same cards and the same four comparisons, but no partnerships, no ordago, and the object turned inside out. Everyone starts with an equal pile of stones, winning a round lets you throw stones out of the game, players drop out as they empty, and the last one still holding any is the loser. Six can play as two teams of three seated alternately, with the rules and the scoring exactly as in the four-handed game.

• bluffing
• classic
• counting
• long-game
• partnership
• strategy

Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Naipes Heraclio Fournier, Gambiter, Denexa Games, Ludoteka, Torofun, Bizkaia.eus.