Coinche

Coinche, more fully La Coinche or La Belote Coinchee, is a French trick-taking card game for four players in two fixed partnerships, sitting opposite one another. It is a bidding version of Belote: instead of a single turned-up card proposing the trump suit, the players auction for the right to name trumps, and the team that undertakes to win the higher number of card points chooses the suit. The word comes from the French verb coincher, a form of contrer, meaning to double the stakes when a player believes the opponents' bid will fail. A 32-card pack is used, deal and play run anticlockwise, and the first side to reach 2000 points wins the match. The game has very many regional and household variants affecting the deal, the bidding, the play and the scoring. Since the Second World War it has become increasingly popular in France and has displaced the older turned-card form of Belote, sometimes called La Tourne, in many places.