Bouillotte

Bouillotte is a gambling card game of the vying family, in which players bet on whose three-card hand is best. It was introduced at the time of the French Revolution as a regulated form of the older game Brelan, which had been played since the seventeenth century, and it was widely played in France and elsewhere through the late eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. The standard game is for four players using a twenty-card pack, with each suit ranking from ace and king down through queen to nine and eight; five players can add the jacks, and three can play with sixteen cards. Each player starts with an equal supply of chips called the cave, and a round begins with an initial bet that the players to the dealer's right may double by straddling, a practice known in French as the carré. Each player receives three cards and one more is turned face up, and the best hand is a brelan carré, four of a kind made with the aid of the turned card. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the game was supplanted by poker.