Practice mode
Play Court Piece against bots, offline
A real hand, three opponents, no connection required and no rating at stake. Here is how the bots play — and why they structurally cannot see your cards.
Updated October 2026
Practice mode deals you a real hand of Court Piece against three bots. It runs on your device, so it works with no connection at all — on a flight, on the metro, in a basement — and it never touches your competitive rating.
It is the fastest way to learn the game, and the only honest way to practise a variant before you take it to a table full of relatives.
Three skill levels
| Level | How it plays | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Plays legally and sensibly, but spends high cards early and misses chances to trump | Your first few hands, and teaching someone the follow-suit rule |
| Medium | Keeps track of what has been played, holds trumps back, supports its partner | Practising properly — roughly a competent casual player |
| Hard | Counts the suits, remembers who showed out, plays to the score and hunts the kot | Drilling a variant, or finding out what your bad habits are |
The bots cannot cheat. Structurally.
Every Court Piece app with bots gets accused of this, so here is exactly how it works in RUNG.
The game engine hands each seat a view of the match — your own cards, the cards on the table, the score, whose turn it is. A bot asks for the view of the seat it is sitting in, through the same interface the app uses. There is no second interface that returns more:
- A bot cannot see anyone else’s hand, including its partner’s.
- A bot cannot see the undealt deck.
- With Band Hukam on, a bot that is not the caller does not know the trump suit either — it has to work it out from the cards played, exactly like you.
- Every card a bot plays is validated by the same rules engine that validates yours. An illegal card from a bot is rejected the same way.
A hard bot that beats you did it by counting cards, not by reading yours.
Playing with no internet
Practice runs locally. Open the app in airplane mode and you can still deal a hand, play it out and finish the match. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is queued, nothing waits on a server.
The trade-off is that nothing from an offline match counts: no rating, no leaderboard, no season progress. Daily missions and achievements that ask for ranked matches are not satisfied by practice hands either.
Practise the variant before you play it for real
Practice lets you set the same house rules as a private table. The two worth drilling:
- Double Sir. The instinct to trump everything is wrong here, and it takes a few hands against a hard bot to unlearn. The rule in detail.
- Band Hukam. Deducing a hidden trump is a genuine skill, and bots are patient teachers. How hidden trump works.
Bots in online matches
Bots show up in two places outside practice:
- When Quick Play cannot find four humans. Matchmaking searches for real players first and widens its net as you wait; if the queue is genuinely empty, a bot takes a seat so you get a game instead of a spinner.
- When somebody disconnects. A bot covers their turns until they reconnect, so a dropped signal does not freeze the table for the other three.
In a private room the host decides: add a bot to any seat your group cannot fill.
A practice routine that actually helps
- Three hands on easy, concentrating only on following suit correctly.
- Three hands on medium, counting the trumps out loud. Thirteen exist; know how many are left.
- One hand on hard where you deliberately never trump your partner’s winning trick.
- One hand on hard with Double Sir, playing for back-to-back tricks rather than single wins.
Then go and play a ranked match. The rules guide has the five mistakes worth checking yourself against.
Deal a practice hand
No waiting for players, no rating at stake, no connection needed.