Sueca (card game)
 
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| Origin | Portugal |
|---|---|
| Type | Trick taking |
| Players | 4 |
| Skills required | Tactics |
| Age range | 12+ |
| Cards | 40 cards |
| Deck | French |
| Play | Counter clockwise |
| Card rank (highest to lowest) | A 7 K J Q 6 5 4 3 2 |
| Playing time | 15 min |
| Random chance | Low-Moderate |
| Related games | |
| Bisca, Einwerfen, Briscola | |
Sueca (meaning Swedish (female) in Portuguese) is a 4 player-partnership point trick-taking card game, and a popular variant of the Bisca card game. The game is played in Portugal, Brazil and Angola and other Portuguese communities. Its closest relative is the very similar German game Einwerfen.
Very little is known about the origins of Sueca. The rules of the game are passed down generationally, but vary slightly from region to region in Portugal, its archipelago’s of Madeira and Azores and its former colonial territories of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique. Its close similarities to Bisca, specifically “Bisca dos Sete” (“Bisca of seven” or “Seven's Bisca”), is evidence of its assumed ancestor, the Italian game Briscola.
Sueca is by far the most popular card game in Portuguese communities and can be played socially, but is more often played in taverns (“taberna”) or pubs (“tasca”) in informal betting (bets are made on winning sets of 4 games), or in officiated tournaments (“torneio”) - both professionally (cash prizes) and for arbitrary prizes like lamb, suckling pig, a rooster or a “bifana"
The 7-card hand is the accepted norm, but some play with 8-card deals, or 10-card deals (popular in online play); also while the accepted norm of point cards able to be trump cards, some chose to redraw the trump until a non-point card is chosen. In Brazil the game is played clockwise.
The game is normally played by 4 players. Players sitting across from each other form teams, which compete to take more points than the other team by winning tricks containing valuable cards. Sueca is played with 40 cards by removing 8s, 9s, and 10s, from a standard 52 card deck. The ranks of the cards, in order from highest to lowest, is: Ace, 7, King, Jack, Queen, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. The entire deck is distributed equally to the 4 players with the dealer, who turns up one of their cards after the dealing, sequentially rotated. Each player is required to follow suit, and can play a trump only when void in the lead suit. Whoever wins the trick leads the next.
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Wikipedia