Romestecq

Romestecq is a historical Dutch trick-taking card game for two, four or six players divided into two teams, with roots dating back to at least the seventeenth century. Played with a thirty-six card French-suited deck in the Paris pattern, the game proceeds anticlockwise and uses no trump suit, a simpler structural choice than many later trick-taking games. Beyond the Netherlands, Romestecq was also popular in France for more than a hundred years, and although contemporary writers sometimes criticized its rules as unnecessarily complicated, it continued to appear in card-game literature through the end of the nineteenth century. Its historical importance was recognized again in the twenty-first century when it was included in The Penguin Book of Card Games, published in 2008.