Bête

Bête, also recorded as la Bête, Beste or la Beste, and originally known as Homme or l'Homme, is an old French trick-taking card game usually played by three to five players, though variants exist for as few as two and as many as seven. It belongs to the Rams family of card games and originated in France during the seventeenth century as a development of the earlier game Triomphe, into which it introduced bidding mechanics borrowed from the Spanish card game Ombre. Depending on the number of players, Bête is played with between twenty eight and thirty six cards drawn from a standard deck, and it follows a plain-trick structure with no mechanism for dropping out of a hand partway through, unlike some related Rams-family games. Although it could be played socially, Bête carried a real gambling element built around a penalty system known as the bete, under which a player who failed to win an expected number of tricks paid a stake into a growing pool.