Sueca (card game)

Sueca is a four player partnership trick-taking card game of the ace-ten family, played primarily in Portugal, Brazil, Angola and other Portuguese-speaking communities, and generally regarded as a popular variant of the older Bisca card game. Its name comes from the Portuguese word for a Swedish woman, though the reason for that name is not firmly established. The game is played by four people organized into two partnerships of two, with partners seated across from one another so they can cooperate through their card play to win tricks containing valuable cards. It uses a reduced forty card deck formed by removing the eights, nines and tens from a standard fifty two card French deck, and the cards rank from highest to lowest within each suit as ace, seven, king, jack, queen, six, five, four, three and two; players must follow the suit led when able, and may only play a trump card when they hold no card of the led suit. Each hand distributes a total of 120 points among the cards captured in tricks, and the first partnership to accumulate 61 or more of those points wins the hand, with bonus scoring multipliers awarded for capturing all 120 points or exceeding 90; a full match is won by the first partnership to take four hands.