Vira (card game)

Vira, also spelled Wira, is a Swedish card game for three players, played with an ordinary 52-card pack in the Boston family of trick-taking games with bidding. Each of the three active players is dealt thirteen cards and the remaining thirteen form a stock that players can use to improve their hands, and when four sit at the table the player on the dealer's right takes no part in that hand. An auction decides which one player plays alone against the other two, and the range of contracts is unusually wide: the declarer may aim to take a stated number of tricks, or may play a misere contract in which the aim is to lose every trick. Chips are paid into and out of a pool after each hand. The Pagat card games site describes the game as evolving from an earlier game called Lomber Boston, or improved Exchange-Boston, described in 1809, and notes that the earliest known Vira bid table was published in 1818.