Zole

Zole, sometimes called Zolite, is a Latvian trick-taking card game for three to five players, though a hand is always contested among exactly three active players in a given round, with the others sitting out. The game belongs to the Schafkopf family of ace-ten games, in which jacks and queens are fixed permanent trumps regardless of the trump suit chosen for a hand, and play uses only twenty-six cards drawn from a larger thirty-two or thirty-six card piquet or French-suited deck, with the unused cards forming a talon that shapes the bidding. One player, decided through bidding, plays alone as the declarer against the other two working together, and the game's name and identity are closely tied to Latvian card-playing culture, where it is regarded as something close to a national card game.