Baśka

Baśka is a four-player trick-taking card game from Kashubia, the Pomeranian region around Gdansk in northern Poland. It is played with a shortened French-suited pack of sixteen cards, the aces, tens, queens and jacks, and it belongs to the Schafkopf family, in which queens and jacks are permanent trumps. Players bid and double one another before the first card is led, and the holders of the two black queens normally form a hidden partnership against the other two. The game takes its name from a pet form of Barbara, which is also the name of its highest bid, a hand holding all four queens that wins without play. Compared with its close relative Kop, from the Poznań region, Baśka adds extra contracts such as Gran, where only the jacks are trumps, and uses different scoring. Tournament players also use variants that promote the ace of clubs or the ace of spades to the head of the trump suit.