Suit yourself

15-06-24

How should a personal trump suit work?

Trump suits are a ubiquitous feature of trick-taking card games. Many of the best trick-takers involve trump suits of some kind or other (though certainly not all — looking at you Piquet).

There are lots of different types of trump suits:

You get the idea.

Usually, though, the set of trump cards are the same for all players, at any given moment in time. This is not the case in the game Calypso, where each player has their own, distinct, personal trump suit. As I have been experimenting with variants of this game, I have also decided to revisit the logic underpinning this game by looking at how a personal trump suit should behave. I will end with a proposal for an amendment to the trickplay rules of Calypso that I think may be fruitful in allowing for more strategic possibilities.

How do trump suits usually work?

First, let's review how trump suits work in the usual case. Then we can see how we can find equivalent rules that will make sense if every player has a distinct personal trump suit.

A trump suit is a suit in a trick-taking card game. Depending on the game, there may be various special rules around trumps regarding things like:

However, the defining feature of a trump suit relates to how they behave in determining the winner of a trick. The usual, succinct, statement of this is that the winner of a trick is:

  1. the player who plays the highest-ranked card of the trump suit, or,
  2. if no trumps are played, the highest card of the suit led.

Which cards are considered trumps will depend on the game, and the situation within the game. Additionally, the ranking of cards within the trump suit also depends on the game, as well as potentially other parts of the current context of the game. (by which I mean rules like the option in Doppelkopf where the second Dulle beats the first — we may consider the relative ranking of these two as being dependent on the context of the trick in which they are played). But overall I cannot think of any trick-taking games (with trumps) where the trick-winning rules do not take this form — in particular rule 1) (please let me know of any exceptions you are aware of!).

Although the above rules are convenient for being clear and simple, in order for us to consider how things should work for individual trump suits, it will be useful to consider a few specific cases, rather than these more general rules. So let's break down the possibilities into a few scenarios, along with the winners in each case.

In the following table, cards with '†' denote a card of the trump suit, those without denote cards of the (non-trump) suit which has been led, and 'x' denotes an arbitrary card of a suit that is neither the suit led, nor the trump suit (i.e. a discard). North (N) leads to all tricks, and cards rank in standard order (2 (low) up to A (high)). The examples are all four-handed tricks, but there is nothing special about that number here.

Scenario Example tricks Example trick winner
North (N) East (E) South (S) West (W)
A trump is led, and no higher trump is played Q† J† 8† 3† N (as the leader - highest trump played)
" 8† x 7† x "
A trump is led, but another player plays a higher trump Q† K† 3† 9† E (highest trump played)
" Q† K† A† x S (highest trump played)
Non-trump is led, noöne trumps 4 K Q 2 E (highest card of suit led)
" T x x J W (highest card of suit led)
Non-trump is led, another player trumps 8 x 6† K S (highest trump)
" 8 x 6† 8† W (highest trump)

Personal trump rules

Let's now consider the case where each player has their own trump suit, which is distinct. We'll go through all possible scenarios, and work out what kind of rules will be consistent with the above table, so that these can really be considered 'trump suits'.

We'll compare this to how the rules work in Calypso, and try to guess why there may be discrepancies.

Trump lead, no other trumps

First off, let's consider the case where a player leads their personal trump suit, and everyone else follows. Well, a trump was led, noöne else played a trump (from their perspective), so it makes perfect sense that the leader should win the trick. The same applies if other players discard - just as long as no other player plays their own trump suit. This agrees with the rule in Calypso.

For the moment we'll postpone the discussion about what happens if another player does play their trump suit.

Plain suit lead

Now let's think about a 'plain suit' lead. There aren't really any plain suits (unless perhaps with fewer than four players, such as in Neutralised Calypso — at any rate purely plain suits are straightforward and require no special rule), as every suit is somebody's personal trump suit. So what we really mean is a lead of someone else's trump suit.

If the person whose trump suit is led doesn't follow suit, then the situation is much as in an ordinary trump game. If no other player trumps in, the highest card of the suit led wins, otherwise the highest trump played wins.

So now let's consider the case where the player whose suit it is (let's call them Ken) plays a card of that suit. Assume everyone else either follows or discards.

On the one hand, Ken has played a card of his trump suit to a plain suit lead, with no other playing trump. Viewed that way, Ken should win the trick.

The other perspective is that Ken has followed suit to a plain suit lead. Thus his entitlement to win the trick depends purely on whether his card is highest ranked in this suit, of those played.

I personally think one could make a reasonable case for either perspective. You could try and argue for one case or the other, depending on whether you consider the type of trick (trump or plain suit) to be set by the lead, or whether you think that 'following suit' and 'playing a trump' are distinct or overlapping categories.

Ultimately, however, I think the choice should come down to which rule leads to the more interesting game. If we had a deal where everyone had the same distribution of cards, it would be pretty boring if every single trick was won by the player whose trump suit it consisted of. Therefore I think the more interesting choice is to say that if a player is following suit, they are not considered to be playing a trump, and thus Ken can only win if he plays the highest card (i.e. we pick the second of the two options). This agrees with how things work in Calypso, and I can only assume a similar consideration was made at some point.

This then also simplified what happens if one of the other players (neither Ken nor the leader) plays a trump - if only one of them does, they win automatically, or if they both do then the higher ranked of the two wins.

Trumping a trump lead

There is one last scenario to consider — the postponed situation from earlier. That is the case where a player (let's call her Jo) leads a card of her personal trump suit, and another player (let's borrow Ken again) plays a card of his trump suit (i.e. he trumps in). If multiple other players play their own trumps that is not a problem, we can safely assume that Ken's is the card that ranks highest out of those (that's who we're labelling 'Ken'), so it won't affect the forthcoming discussion.

According to our table above, the situation is in fact clear - a trump is led, other players play a trump, so there are two outcomes depending on the relative ranks of the cards:

I think this is really the only reasonable interpretation. I could maybe see a stretch of a viewpoint where Jo always wins (Ken is not following suit to a trump lead, so cannot win the trick), but I think that's a very weak argument, and undermines the concept of a personal trump suit (let alone leading to an incredibly boring game, where players can never lose a trick if they lead their own trumps).

If you are already familiar with Calypso, or you have been paying attention to the structure of this section, you may be unsurprised to hear that this is not the rule in Calypso. Instead the rule is simply:

To clarify, the rule in Calypso relating to this is that:

So this is not really quite a trump suit in the full sense. Perhaps the most useful way to view a trump lead in Calypso (in my opinion) is as a plain suit lead, but where every rank is equivalent to an Ace. This is also the rule which is most frequently misinterpreted in Calypso, and has in fact led to a variant rule which is true to a proper trump suit.

So why this change? Well, the original inventors/developers of the game are no longer around to answer questions, so we can only speculate as to why this nonintuitive rule was instituted. However, speculation is my middle name, so let's dig in.

Probably the reason is down to gameplay. Trump leads are already powerful, as players automatically win the trick if everyone follows suit. Requiring players to win the lead by not only trumping in (after running out of the led suit), but also playing sufficiently high trump gives an incredible amount of power to the player on lead. A player can easily run a series of small trumps while everyone follows, and continue with high trumps without a care in the world. In Standard Calypso, contrastlingly, the threat looms of players running out of your trump suit, as they can win the lead as soon as they are able to play a trump, regardless of which rank you lead.

I personally prefer the rule as it exists in Standard Calypso, unintuitive though it is. I think it makes for more interesting play. Leads are already pretty powerful, so making it even harder to win the lead really makes the game especially uneven.

It does create the strange situation though where, if you lead a trump, the rank of the card you play is entirely irrelevant with regards to winning the trick. There are secondary consequences — not having a particular card later on, and its utility for a calypso, but in terms of trick-winning, either no other player trumps (leader wins) or they do (leader loses), without the rank coming into it. Aside from the fact that there is maybe something a bit dissatisfying about that fact, it also somewhat flattens potential strategy. If the rank doesn't matter for winning the trick, then the choice of which rank to lead matters a bit less, as there is less to take into account when deciding which card to lead.

So if I prefer the rule as it exists in Calypso, why am I discussing this at all? It's not actually this rule that I dislike particularly. It's really the rule that upon leading a trump, you win if everyone follows. It becomes particularly difficult in situations such as Auction Calypso where you have many cards in hand (okay, this game is my invention, so I am free to change that. But let's ignore that a moment and see where this goes). Whoever is on lead can lead out as many trumps as the fewest number an opponent has, without worrying about ranks. With so many cards, this makes for fairly dull strategy.

However, in mulling this over, I have another possible angle of approach.

A proposal

The problem with using the 'purer' trump rule, i.e. where a trump lead must be beaten by a player who ruffs in order for them to head the trick, is that it makes the lead (in my opinion) too powerful. This is because you have two particular benefits when leading a trump:

Really, the aim is to eliminate the first benefit, so that the (introduced) second benefit is not too overpowered. We have also established that the first rule is really the choice which we need to make to be true to considering these individual suits to be trump suits. So are stuck with it?

My proposal is not actually to change this rule. My suggestion is more along the lines of putting the 'if' into italics. What I mean by that excessively cryptic comment, is that rather than make an amendment to the rule governing who wins a trick, I instead wish to amend the rule which determines which cards are legal to play.

In particular, I want to relax the rule that players must follow suit when able. If players are not obliged to follow suit, then leading a trump will not be an automatic trick in the pocket whenever players still possess cards of the leader's trump suits. I think that introducing the rule change requiring players to 'beat the leader' when ruffing helps to retain some of the power of leading, without it being too much. Instead, the situation is much as in ordinary trump games, whereby you are only guaranteed (or likely) to win leads of your trump suit when you lead the top (or very high) cards.

My proposed rule is based on the trickplay rules in Swiss Jass games, and as such I shall refer to it as the Swiss Rule (ed. Oct. '24: or more appropriately the All Fours rule). This is that:

In Parlett's notation this is ft,tr. It is similar to the rule in Swiss Jass games, but in our situation we do not have the equivalent of a 'trump lead' as such — to the other players, any lead is a plainsuit lead in some sense. So we are never obliged to trump. I have also not included the complexities of the undertrumping rule (I do not think this rule is crucial for the game to 'work', but anyone more knowledgeable than me on the matter feel free to point out problems!).

Despite my middle name, I am not going to speculate too seriously about whether the original inventors may have considered such a rule. It doesn't seem crazy that they may have encountered games with different rules on following suit, but given the Bridge-based lens through which things were viewed, alternatives may not have been considered. But a rule such as this may have been toyed with, and rejected, either because it doesn't work very well (which may indeed prove to be the case), or for instance if it was deemed this might make it harder to market to Bridge players.

This is quite a major change. Although the rule change is relatively small, changing what cards are legal has a very big impact on the feel of the game. Many strategies will change — some leads are now completely safe, whilst others that were relatively safe (e.g. leading an opponent Ace) are much less so (the other opponent may always trump if they have any). But I think that this has interesting strategic potential, not only in the context of Auction Calypso, but in other forms of the game, and is something worth exploring.

If anyone does give this a whirl please do tell me about the experience!