Objective

Coinche is a four-player game, played with two teams of two. In the game, players take turns bidding and getting points. When a team reaches 2000 points for a regular game or 1000 points for a half-game, the team with the most points wins.

Cards

There are four suits, clubs, diamonds, spades and hearts. For each suit, there are cards from 7 to ace. with ace being the strongest, followed by 10, king, queen, jack, 9, 8 and 7 in non-trump suits. However, in trump (or 'atout') suits, there is a twist with jack being the strongest and 9 being the second.

Every card has a point value, as follows:

• 7, 8: 0 points
• 9: 0 when non-trump and 14 when trump
• J: 2 when non-trump and 20 when trump
• Q: 3 points
• K: 4 points
• 10: 10 points
• A: 11 points

The sum of the cards is 152 points, plus 10 points for the last trick (known as 'Dix de Der'), for a total of 162 points.

Gameplay

In the bidding phase, the cards are dealt. Each player bids for their team the number of points they are trying to get, with the trump suit chosen. Bidding starts with 82 points, and goes up by units of 10. When all players pass, the bidding is finished. If no one bids, the hand is redealt. Otherwise, the last bidding player wins the contract and the trick-taking starts.

Each round consists of 8 tricks of 4 cards. In each trick, the first player leads a card, then other players must follow suit if able. If they don't have the suit required they must trump (known as 'cutting'), unless their partner is winning or they don't have any trumps, in which case they must slough.

Cutting wins the trick, otherwise the strongest card with the initial trick suit wins. The winner of each trick collects the cards played in the trick, and starts the next one. This continues until the last trick.

At the end of the round, each team counts the points they collected, and see if the bidding team finishes their bid. If the bid is successful, the bidding team win the bid points (plus the trick points in some games). Their opponents win their trick points. If the bid is failed, the bidding team scores zero. Their opponents win the bid points plus 160 points.

Coinche

During the bidding, the opponents can call 'Coinche', which means they think the bidding team won't make their bid. Then, the bidding ends and the points scored at the end of the round are doubled.

Other bids

Players can choose whether to add these additional contracts:

No trump (Sans-Atout): No suit is consider as trump, so there is no cutting. All trump (Tout-Atout): All suits are consider as trump, so there is also no cutting. All players must play a higher card than the previous card if they can.

In these cases, the total is modified to make the sum to be 152.

Belote

The king and queen of the trump is called 'Belote'. This combination is worth an extra 20 points if declared.

When a player wants to declare a belote, they say 'Belote' when playing one of the belote, and 'Rebelote' when playing the other.

There is no Belote when playing no trump or all trump.