Barbu

Glossary

Every term found in the rules and variants inside the app, with what it precisely refers to.

A — C

• Barbu — Nickname of the king of hearts, who wears a beard in the French pattern. By extension, the name of the contract that consists in avoiding him, and then of the whole game.
• Blue Team — The Italian bridge squad, repeatedly world champions between the 1950s and 1970s, whose players popularised the elaborate form of Barbu with contract choice and doubling.
• Bombu — The king of hearts in the Provençal variant, and the contract that consists in avoiding him. There he is worth +80, that is 80 bad points.
• Compendium game — A family of games where a session is not one deal repeated but a run of small games, each with its own instruction. Barbu is the French example; Austrian Herzeln, Hungarian Lorum, Brazilian King and Trex in the Arab world are its cousins.
• Contract — The instruction for one hand: what must be avoided, or on the contrary taken. A session of Barbu is a run of different contracts, which sets it apart from an ordinary trick-taking game.

D — L

• Dealer — The player who deals. The role moves on from hand to hand or from round to round, in the direction of play.
• Declarer — The player who chooses the contract. Depending on the version this is the dealer, or a separate player who also leads to the first trick while the player on their right deals.
• Discard — A card played when you cannot follow suit. It is the only moment where you genuinely choose what to get rid of, and therefore the tactical heart of the negative contracts.
• Dominoes — Another name for the Patience contract, from the sequences laid out on the table.
• Doubling — A side-bet between two players on which of them will finish the hand with the better score. The loser pays the other the difference between their raw scores. A player may double several opponents at once; the declarer may only double those who doubled them. Many tables also require the declarer to be doubled a minimum number of times per round: that is an agreement between players, which the app counts but never enforces.
• Fan tan — The English name of the Patience contract.
• Follow suit — To play a card of the suit led. It is an absolute obligation as long as you hold one.
• Hand — Either the cards a player holds, or one deal from shuffle to last trick. Emptying your hand is the goal of the Patience contract.
• Honour — King, queen or jack, as opposed to number cards.
• Lead — The first card of a trick, and the act of playing it. Several contracts forbid leading hearts while you hold another suit, precisely to stop you forcing the penalty on the others.

M — R

• Nullo — Another name for the “no tricks” contract, used in the Yale version. Often kept in reserve as a safety game, since tricks spread out naturally and disaster is rare.
• Open a suit — In the Patience contract, to lay the first card of a suit not yet on the table. It is only possible with the card of the starting rank: the 10 in the French version, the turned-up card in Bombu, a rank announced by the leader elsewhere.
• Overtrump — To play a trump higher than one already in the trick. In the Trumps contract this is compulsory whenever you can.
• Pass — In the Patience contract, to give up your turn because none of your cards can be laid. You never pass by choice: as soon as a card can go down, you must play it.
• Ravage City — An extra no-trump contract. At the end of the hand each player counts, suit by suit, the cards taken in their tricks and keeps only their best suit. Whoever has the highest such total takes the whole penalty; on a tie, often in different suits, it is shared.
• Round — A run of hands led by the same player. In classic Barbu each player leads a round of seven hands, one per contract.
• Rubber — Borrowed from bridge: a complete run of contracts making up a session. In three-player Barbu a rubber is seven hands, and three are often played so that each has a turn at declaring first.

S — Z

• Salade — A hand where every negative contract is scored at once. Also called générale, ratatouille or bouillabaisse. Penalties stack inside a single trick: a trick holding two hearts, a queen and the king of hearts costs all four at the same time. By far the heaviest hand in French Barbu.
• Scoring set — The whole table of point values given to each card and each contract. Barbu has no official one: every table plays its own, inherited from a family or a club.
• Ratatouille — A synonym of Salade, along with bouillabaisse and générale. Its opposite, the anti-ratatouille, asks you to take everything instead: in the app you get it by flipping the sign of every value in the set.
• Sequence — Cards that follow one another in the same suit. The raw material of the Patience contract, where you build up and down from the starting card.
• Set order — A way of playing where contracts follow a fixed order laid down by the rules, with nobody choosing. The oldest French form, and the one used in Bombu.
• Rank (starting) — In the Patience contract, the rank announced by the leader from which every suit must be started: « dominoes from the seven ». No suit may be opened with any other card.
• Slam — Taking every trick in a hand, or every card of the suit or honour at stake. Far from being a rewarded feat, it reverses the outcome: in Bombu a slam is worth −320 instead of the points collected.
• Suit — One of the four families of cards: spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs.
• Trick — The set of cards played, one per player, in one turn around the table. It goes to the highest trump, or failing that to the highest card of the suit led, and its winner leads to the next.
• Trump — A privileged suit whose lowest card beats the highest of any other. Barbu is played without trumps, with one exception: the contract of that name, where the declarer names the suit and any player able to head the trick with a trump must do so.
• Turned-up card — In Bombu, the last card of the deal, turned face up by the dealer: it opens the Patience layout and fixes the rank at which every new suit may be opened.
• Zero sum — A property of a scoring set where the points won on a contract exactly offset the points lost. The four players' totals stay at zero, which makes the score sheet self-checking. The tournament version has it; French Barbu does not.

Some terms change name from table to table without changing meaning: patience, dominoes and fan tan are the same contract, as are trick and lead-round, or slam and capot.