Judgement

Overview

Judgement — also called Kachufool or Oh Hell — is a four-player trick-taking game where precision beats power. Before each round you predict exactly how many tricks you will win, and only exactness scores.

Bid three and win three, and you score. Bid three and win four, and you score nothing at all. Overshooting is punished as hard as falling short, which inverts the usual instinct: past a certain point in a round, winning tricks is the thing you are trying to avoid.

Everyone plays for themselves across ten rounds, and the highest total wins.

Ten rounds, shrinking hands

Round one deals ten cards each. Every round after deals one fewer, down to the single card of round ten:

10 → 9 → 8 → 7 → 6 → 5 → 4 → 3 → 2 → 1

A ten-card hand gives you room to steer — suits to duck into, cards to throw away. A one-card hand gives you none. You look at one card, name a number, and play it. The last few rounds are close to pure reading, and they routinely reorder the scoreboard.

Scoring — and the sweep bonus

Hit your bid exactly and you score 10 + your bid. Miss it in either direction and you score zero.

• Bid 0, win 0 → 10
• Bid 3, win 3 → 13
• Bid 3, win 2 or 4 → 0

But there is a bonus most players never find. Bid every trick in the round and make them all, and you score an extra ten times your bid.

• Round 1 — bid 10, win 10 → 10 + 10 + 100 = 120 points
• Round 5 — bid 6, win 6 → 10 + 6 + 60 = 76 points
• Round 10 — bid 1, win 1 → 10 + 1 + 10 = 21 points

A solid round is worth 12 to 15. A first-round sweep is worth eight good rounds at once, and it will decide the match on its own.

So the safe-bidding advice has a real exception: if you are dealt a hand that genuinely takes everything, the maths says take the risk. Everywhere else, accuracy pays better than ambition.

Bidding, and the dealer rule

Everyone bids before a card is played, anywhere from 0 up to the number of cards in the round. Bidding zero is a real strategy — ten points for successfully avoiding every trick.

One restriction applies, and only to the dealer: the dealer may not make the bids add up to exactly the number of tricks available. If four players hold five cards each and the first three have bid four between them, the dealer cannot bid one.

Somebody must therefore be wrong every round. That is the point — the table can never all be right at once, and as dealer you are forced to choose which side of the number to miss on.

Rotating trump

Trump changes every round in a fixed cycle:

Hearts → Spades → Diamonds → Clubs, then round again.

Because it is predictable rather than random, you can see it coming. The same five cards are a strong hand in one round and nearly worthless two rounds later, and knowing which suit is about to be trump is worth as much as knowing your own cards.

Playing the tricks

• The leader plays a card; everyone must follow the led suit if they can.
• Void in the led suit? Play anything, including a trump.
• Highest trump wins. If no trump was played, the highest card of the led suit wins.
• The winner leads the next trick.

Compulsory following is what makes the bid hard to control. You cannot always duck a trick you do not want — if your only club is the ace and clubs are led, the trick is yours whether you wanted it or not.

Strategy and tips

• Bid the hand you can control, not the one you can win with. Aces are likely tricks, not certain ones — anyone void in that suit can trump them away.
• Stop when you get there. The moment you have made your bid, your job reverses: start shedding high cards and staying out of the lead.
• Watch short suits both ways. Being void gives you control over when you trump, and it is also how you accidentally win a trick you did not want.
• Count the high trumps. Once the top ones are gone, a card that was dangerous becomes safe to hold.
• Read the bids. A high bid means someone thinks they can force tricks; a zero means someone will duck everything they can.
• Take the sweep when it is really there — and only then. A failed all-in bid scores nothing at all.

If you liked Judgement

Call Break is the closest relative and shares this engine: five rounds of thirteen tricks, bids from 2 to 9, and scoring that rewards overtricks with decimal bonuses rather than punishing them — the opposite philosophy on the same mechanics.

Hearts and Spades are the classic trick-taking pair, and Mendicot is the Indian partnership game where tens are what matter.