What is a trick-taking game?

Teen Do Panch belongs to the oldest and largest family of card games there is. If you have played Whist, Spades, Hearts, Euchre, Bridge or Callbreak, you already know most of how it works — and the few places where it departs from the family are the interesting ones.

What a trick is

A trick is one round of play in which every player contributes a single card, face up, in turn. One of those cards wins by a rule the game sets, and the player who played it takes the trick and leads the next one.

A deal therefore breaks into as many tricks as each player holds cards. Ten cards each means ten tricks, which is what Teen Do Panch deals. The whole game becomes a sequence of small contests where the only real question is when to spend your strong cards.

Teen Do Panch calls a trick a hand, and its scoreboards use that word throughout. The two terms mean the same thing.

Following suit

Nearly every game in this family obliges you to follow the led suit — to play a card of the same suit as the first card of the trick — if you hold one. Only when your hand is void in that suit are you free to play anything.

That single obligation is what makes the games deep. It means the leader partly chooses what everyone else must do, and it means running a player out of a suit is a way of setting them free later. Tracking who has stopped following which suit is the core skill in every game of this type.

Trumps

A trump suit outranks every other. Any trump beats any card of any other suit, and among trumps the usual rank order decides. Games differ mainly in how the trump suit is chosen: turned up at random, bid for, fixed by convention, or — as here — nominated by one particular player.

In Teen Do Panch the player on target 5 names trump after seeing only the first five of their ten cards. Choosing on partial information is a distinctive wrinkle, and it is why length in a suit is a better reason to pick it than height.

Some games in the family have no trumps at all, and some — the tarot games — use a whole separate trump suit of its own.

How trick-taking games are scored

Almost every game in the family picks one of four approaches.

Plain-trick games count the tricks themselves. Whist, Spades and Callbreak work this way: more tricks is simply better.
Point-trick games give individual cards values and count those instead, so a trick containing an ace is worth far more than an empty one. Pinochle, Skat and Belote are of this kind.
Avoidance games invert the goal. In Hearts you are trying not to collect certain cards, and taking tricks is usually bad.
Contract games ask you to predict your own result and score you against that promise. Bridge and Spades both do this; missing a bid can cost more than taking no tricks at all.

Teen Do Panch is closest to that last category — you are measured against a number — with the crucial difference that you never get to choose the number.

Four unusual things about 3-2-5

Set beside the rest of the family, four features stand out.

Targets are assigned, not bid. Your requirement for the round — 5, 3 or 2 tricks — comes from the seat you are in, and the seats rotate every round. There is no auction and no bluffing about your hand's strength. Everyone knows exactly what everyone else needs, from the first card.
Three players and no partners. Most of the famous games in this family are four-handed partnership games. With three players and nobody on your side, alliances form for a single trick and dissolve — whoever is closest to overshooting becomes the common problem.
Tricks must be won in pairs to count. Winning a trick is not the same as keeping it. Tricks accumulate in an at-stake pool and are only claimed by winning two in succession. This is the rule with no close equivalent elsewhere, and it makes two adjacent honours worth more than four scattered aces.
The score is paid in cards, not points. Falling short of target costs you actual cards from your hand at the start of the next round, drawn blind by the player you owe. A bad round does not just sit in a column; it physically weakens the hand you play next.

Together those last two are why the game rewards a kind of planning that Spades and Hearts do not: you are trying to arrange consecutive wins, and you are managing an asset — your cards — that persists past the end of the round.

If you already play something else

From Spades or Callbreak: the follow-suit and trump mechanics will feel immediately familiar. Unlearn one habit — cashing winners as soon as you safely can. Here that scatters your wins and claims nothing.
From Hearts: the three-player free-for-all dynamic will suit you, but the goal is inverted back again. You want tricks, and you want them consecutively.
From Bridge: expect far less information management and far more tactical counting. With eight cards a suit and three hands, exact counting is achievable within a round or two of practice.
From nothing at all: read the sixty-second version in the guide and play one round against the computer. The rules make much more sense once ten tricks have gone past.

Next: the full rules, the tactics on the strategy page, the arithmetic on how scoring works, and every term defined in the glossary. Or just open the game in this browser, or get the Android app from Google Play.