Barbu
History
The game
Barbu is a French trick-taking game for four players, played with an ordinary pack. Its name comes from the king of hearts: in the traditional French pattern that king wears a beard — barbu — and the contract that consists in avoiding him ended up naming the whole game.
A game made of games
Barbu belongs to the family of compendium games: a session is not one deal repeated, but a series of small games in a row, each with its own instruction and its own scoring. Avoid tricks, avoid hearts, avoid queens, avoid one particular king, avoid the last tricks — then, the other way round, take as much as you can. It has cousins everywhere: Austrian Herzeln, Quodlibet, Hungarian Lorum, Brazilian King, Trex in the Arab world.
One thing stands out when you compare tables: there is no official scoring. The king of hearts costs 40 points here, 80 there; the queen is worth less than a heart at one table and twice as much at the next. Some lineages, especially those inherited from bridge players, tune the values so that a full round totals zero: what one player loses, another gains, and the score sheet checks itself. French parlour versions happily do without.
Two ages of Barbu
- An older, simpler form, common in France: the contracts follow a fixed order, with no choice and no bidding. You play, you count, you move on.
- A modern, tactical form, worked out by bridge players — it was a favourite pastime of the Italian Blue Team. The declarer picks the contract, and above all each player may double the others: a side-bet on which of the two will come out better. That is where the game stops being about cards and starts being about judgement.
As many scoring sets as there are tables
Barbu has no official rules. Every table has its own, inherited from a family, a club or one particular summer: the king of hearts is −20 here, −15 or −25 elsewhere; the dominoes payout changes from house to house; some add contracts nobody else has heard of. That is the normal life of a game passed on by word of mouth — and a nightmare for whoever keeps score.
Why Easy Barbu
It grew out of one idea: a score sheet that adapts to the game rather than the other way round. Pick a ready-made variant, or build your own scoring set — number of players, pack size, active contracts, value of every card — save it under a name and find it again next time. The app adds up, checks the totals, catches entry mistakes and keeps the history, so that the only thing left to do at the table is play.
The variants offered here are credited to the people who passed them on. If your table plays a version that is not listed, the custom scoring set exists for it.