Welcome to Kachuful!

Hey there! Have you heard of Kachuful? It’s an exciting game that you can play with 3 to 7 players. The goal of the game is simple – you need to bid on the exact number of tricks you think you can make. But here’s the catch: taking more or fewer tricks than your bid will count as a loss. So, it’s all about making those accurate predictions!

Before starting the game, it’s important to decide on a target score that you will play towards. This way, everyone knows what they are aiming for.

Getting Set Up

Ready to get started? Great! Let’s go over the setup. To begin, the first dealer is chosen randomly. The deal will then pass clockwise to the next player.

Next, the cards are shuffled and dealt to each player one by one until everyone has the correct number of cards based on the number of players. The number of cards dealt in the first hand will vary depending on the number of players:

• For 3-5 players, each player gets 10 cards.
• For 6 players, each player gets 8 cards.
• And for 7 players, each player gets 7 cards.

Let me explain how Kachuful is played. It’s a card game where each hand is played with one less card than the previous one until you end up with a one-card hand. Then, you start adding cards back one at a time until you reach the original number of cards in the hand. For example, if you start with 8 cards, the series would go like this: 8 cards, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So, there’s a total of 15 hands in a game.

Now, let’s talk about the trump suit. In every round of Kachuful, the trump suit changes following a pattern: Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts.

Card Ranking

The ranking of the cards in Kachuful is traditional. The Ace is the highest card, followed by King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2 as the lowest card.

BIDDING

In a game of bidding, every player gets a turn to make a prediction about how many tricks they will win. The bidding starts with the player to the left of the dealer and goes around in a circle, ending with the dealer’s bid. Everyone has to make a bid, even if it’s zero. If you bid zero, that means you don’t expect to win any tricks in that round. You can change your bid as long as the player to your left hasn’t made their bid yet.

There’s a special rule for the dealer – they can’t bid a number that would make the total number of bids equal to the total number of tricks available. This is known as the “hook”. It’s important to avoid the hook, as it can result in an over or underbid. The dealer can keep changing their bid until the first card is played.

HOW TO PLAY

So here’s how the game goes: I’m sitting to the left of the dealer, and I get to go first. I can choose any suit to play, even the trump suit. After me, the other players have to follow suit. If they can’t, they can play any card they want, including trumps.

Now, to win a trick, you need to play the highest-ranked trump card. But if there are no trumps played, then the highest value card of the leading suit takes the trick. And the winner of the trick gets to lead the next one. We keep going like this until all the tricks are played. Then we deal the next hand and start all over again.

Scoring

Before we even begin playing, we have to pick someone to keep track of the scores. It can be another player or someone else. But if it’s a player, we have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t make any mistakes or try to cheat.

There are a few different ways to score points in Kachuful, but let’s start with the simplest one. If I win exactly the number of tricks that I bid, I get 10 points plus the number of tricks I bid. So, if I win and I bid 5 tricks, I’ll get a total of 15 points for that round. I’ll cross out the bids I didn’t win and write a ‘1’ in front of the ones I did win.

The most common way to score is a bit different. In this method, each player gets 1 point for every trick they win, plus an extra 10 points if they win the exact number of tricks they bid. So, if I win 3 tricks and I bid 2 tricks, I’ll get a total of 13 points for that round.