How to play Baloot

The rules exactly as High Card Club plays them.

Baloot is the Saudi national card game, for four players in partnerships: you and the player opposite you share one score. You count card points here, not tricks. One team calls the hand and must end up with more points than the other.

The deal

Baloot uses a 32-card deck: sevens up to aces. Everyone is dealt 5 cards and one more is turned face up in the middle. Once the hand is called, the caller takes that turned card and two more, everybody else three, so every hand holds 8 cards and the hand is 8 tricks long. The deal moves one seat left after every hand.

Calling the hand

Starting to the dealer's left, each player passes or calls:

• Hokum makes a suit trump. In the first round of speech the only suit you may call is the suit of the turned card.
• Sun means no trump at all, and ends the calling on the spot.

The first round runs to its end, because Sun outranks a Hokum already on the table. If all four pass, a second round follows in which Hokum may be called in any suit except the turned one, or Sun, and there the first call settles it. All four passing again means a fresh deal.

Doubling

After a Hokum call the other team may double the hand. The callers answer with three, the doublers with four, the callers with gahwa, the coffee, which stakes the whole match. Two passes in a row close it. Sun hands are never doubled.

Playing a trick

The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick, then the winner of each trick leads the next. You may lead anything, trump included, from the first trick on. The card order is unusual, and in Hokum the trump suit has an order of its own:

• Plain suits and every suit in Sun, high to low: ace (11 points), ten (10), king (4), queen (3), jack (2), nine, eight, seven (0).
• The trump suit in Hokum: jack (20), nine (14), ace (11), ten (10), king (4), queen (3), eight, seven (0).

Duties when you are not leading:

• Follow the suit that was led if you hold it. When trump is led in Hokum you must also play a higher trump than the best one on the table, if you have one.
• In Sun, if you are out of the suit, play anything.
• In Hokum, if you are out of the suit you must trump, and overtrump when you can. The one escape: if your partner is winning the trick as it stands, you may play whatever you like.

Scoring a hand

Add up the card points your team won in its tricks, plus 10 for the last trick. In Sun the total is doubled. Divide by ten and round to the nearest whole number, a half going to the defending team. A whole Hokum hand is worth 16 points that way, a whole Sun hand 26.

• The calling team must simply out-score the other team. If it does, each side keeps its own rounded share.
• If it does not, the calling team scores nothing and the defenders take the whole hand: 16 in Hokum, 26 in Sun.
• Kaboot, winning all 8 tricks, is worth 25 in Hokum and 44 in Sun, and the other team gets nothing.
• The baloot, king and queen of trumps dealt to one player in a Hokum hand, is worth 20 card points, so 2 more points on the hand.
• In a doubled hand the winning side takes everything, multiplied by the level it reached: two, three or four. Gahwa hands the winner all 152 points and ends the match there.

Projects

Projects are combinations you are dealt. A run of three in one suit (sira) is worth 2, a run of four (fifty) 5, a run of five or more or four tens, jacks, queens or kings (hundred) 10, and four aces (four hundred) 10. In Sun those become 4, 10, 20 and 40. Runs follow ordinary order, seven up to ace. Only the team holding the single best project scores, and it then scores all of its own; the other team's count for nothing. Projects also weigh in on which team out-scored the other.

How the match ends

The match runs either to 152 points, the traditional target and the only one offered, or for a fixed number of hands: 5, 9 or 11, five by default. Teams level at the end play another hand. A safety cap stops any match after 99 hands.

House rules

• Projects, on by default: sira, 50, 100 and 400 as above. Off, no combination scores anything.
• Doubling, on by default: double up to gahwa. Off, every Hokum hand is played plain.

At the table

Your seat has a clock. At relaxed tempo you get 60 seconds per card and 75 to call, at normal 30 and 40, at fast 15 and 25. Run out of time and the table plays a legal move for you; do that three turns in a row and it keeps playing your seat until you press Take over or play a card yourself. A lost connection holds your seat 60 seconds, or 10 if Discord tells us you closed the game. Leaving a match on purpose gives your seat to a bot for good.

The other games

Back to how to play, or read the rules for Batak, Spades and Tarneeb.