GLOSSARY OF TERMS (or Sauce-ary)

Bid: Before the first trick, players take turns from the dealer’s left clockwise “bidding”; that is, stating how many points they believe they will earn from the tricks they win. For each team, both players’ bids are added to get the team’s total bid (unless one or both bid using a Specialty Bid).

Bidding Lingo: If a team wins more points in a hand than they bid, they “overbid”, and if they fall short of their bid, they “underbid”.  If a bid is satisfied (not necessarily exactly), it is “met” or “made”; if it is not, it is “set”.

Blind Bid: If a team is behind by at least 250 points, its players can choose to bid Blind “Nope!”, and not look at their cards until after bidding has ended. See the Bidding section of the Rules page for additional information.

Hand: A “hand” is a single round, and consists of dealing, bidding, and then playing all of the cards. The cards “in a player’s hand” are the cards that a player still has left to play, whether face-up (due to the “Open-Face” Sauce) or face-down.

Lead / Follow Suit: The first player to play a card on a trick “leads” with the card he plays (the “lead”).  If the other players have cards of the lead’s suit (or a SAUCE card, if a Sauce is of the same suit), they must play cards of that suit (“follow suit”), otherwise, they can play any other card in their hand (play “out of suit”).

Rank: The number on a card; barring a Sauce effect, 10 is the highest rank, and 1 is the lowest.

Sauce: One or two cards dealt face-up at the beginning of a hand, which determine the additional rules used during that hand. The SAUCE cards in the players’ hands act as whatever Sauces are chosen.

Specialty Bid: There are three bids a player can make rather than stating the number of points they expect to take. If a player believes their team can take 225 or more points, they can have their team bid “Shadoof”. If one team bids “Shadoof”, the other team can bid “No Way” if they believe they can take 80 points (enough to set the other team), changing their existing bid if necessary. Finally, if a player believes they can end the round having collected 0 points’ worth of cards, they can bid “Nope”. Note that if one player on a team bids “Nope”, the other can make any other bid, including specialty bids, and it is considered separately in scoring.

Suit: A certain color of card; e.g. the blue 8 and blue 9 are of the same suit, but the red 8 and blue 8 are not.  By default, the blue suit is the “low” suit (worth 0 points and led on the first trick in a hand), and the purple suit is the “high” suit (worth 10 points); the rest are all worth 5 points. The suits’ full priority order (used for game setup and a few select Sauce effects) is as follows:

Lowest O O O O O O Highest

Throw Off: Any card that is played out of suit and is not a trump is “thrown off” or “sloughed” (pr. sluft), and cannot win the trick.  Not to be confused with the Sauce effect “Toss-Out”.

Trick: When each player plays one card in turn, the cards together constitute a “trick”. The player with the highest-ranked card of the suit that was led usually wins the trick.

Trump: In most cases, the high suit is also a trump suit; if a trump card is played on a trick, then the highest-rank trump card wins the trick, rather than the highest-rank card of the suit that led. Note that player that is leading cannot play a trump unless they have been “broken” (i.e. one has been previously been played in the current hand), or if there are no other cards to be played (including SAUCE cards, if a Sauce is of a non-trump suit).