Oh Hell — the rules

Bid exactly how many tricks you will take, then try to be right. Here is the whole game, the special cards, and every rule people argue about.

The short version: everyone gets the same number of cards, everyone calls how many tricks they think they will take, then you play the hand out. Call it exactly right and you score. Miss by one in either direction and you lose points. That is the whole game, and it is why it is a much better game than it sounds.

You may know it by another name

This is one of the most widely renamed games in existence. Oh Hell, Nomination Whist, Blackout, Up and Down the River, Contract Whist, Judgement, Oh Pshaw, Kachuful, Bust — same game, same call-your-tricks idea, small differences in how many rounds you play and how the points work. We keep the full list of names, with the four rules that actually differ between them.

The version on this page is the one played with a 60-card deck and eight special cards, which is the version our game Pythia deals. Where it differs from the plain 52-card Oh Hell you may have grown up with, it says so.

The deck and the players

60 cards: a standard 52-card pack, plus four Magicians and four Jesters. Three to six players. If you are playing plain Oh Hell with a 52-card pack, drop the eight special cards and everything else below still holds.

How many rounds

Round 1 deals one card each, round 2 deals two, and so on until the deck runs out — so the number of rounds is 60 divided by the number of players: 3 players play 20 rounds, 4 play 15, 5 play 12, 6 play 10. With a 52-card pack, deal until you run out of cards the same way.

Trump

After the deal, turn the top card of the remaining stock face up. Its suit is trump for the round. If it is a Magician, the dealer chooses the trump suit — before making their own bid. If it is a Jester, there is no trump. In the final round every card has been dealt, so there is nothing to turn and no trump. The edge cases, and when trump actually wins, are on the trump page.

Bidding

Starting to the dealer's left, each player says how many tricks they will win. Bids are spoken aloud, written down, and binding. The bids do not have to add up to the number of tricks — the table may collectively bid more or fewer. That is the engine of the game: either there is not enough to go round, or there are tricks nobody wants and somebody has to take them.

Many groups play the hook rule, where the dealer — who bids last — may not bid the number that would make the bids add up exactly. It guarantees at least one loser every round. It is a house rule, not the base rule. Full detail, and how to count a bid rather than guess it, on the bidding page.

Playing the tricks

The player to the dealer's left leads. Follow the led suit if you can; if you cannot, play anything, including trump. Magicians and Jesters may always be played, whether or not you could follow.

The trick goes to, in order:

1. the first Magician played;
2. otherwise the highest trump;
3. otherwise the highest card of the led suit;
4. if the trick was all Jesters, the first Jester played.

Lead a Magician and there is no led suit at all — everyone else may play anything, and loses anyway. Lead a Jester and the suit is set by the next card played that is not a Jester. Aces are high. The winner of a trick leads to the next one. Every edge case the eight special cards create is on the Magicians and Jesters page.

Scoring

• Bid exactly right — 20 points, plus 10 for every trick you bid. Bidding 3 and taking 3 is 50. Bidding 0 and taking 0 is 20, not nothing.
• Missed — minus 10 for every trick you were out by, over or under. Bidding 2 and taking 4 is −20, and so is bidding 4 and taking 2.

There is no bonus for winning tricks you did not bid for. Worked examples on the scoring page, and if you would rather not do the arithmetic at all, the free score sheet does it for you and prints onto one page.

Play a hand while it is fresh

The bidding makes far more sense after one round than after any amount of reading, and you do not need to round anyone up for it: play against the computer seats two opponents and deals straight away. No account, nothing to install, free and ad-free, and it keeps score for you — so the first time through you only have to think about the bid. When friends are around, open a room and share the code instead; a computer opponent gives up its seat as soon as a person takes it.

The German game

The 60-card version with Magicians and Jesters is best known in Germany, where it is sold as Wizard by Amigo Spiele — a registered trademark that has nothing to do with us. Our German rules pages are at Regeln, and they are written for German readers rather than translated.