Court Piece variants: Double Sir, Band Hukam and the rest

Ask four people how Court Piece is played and you will get four slightly different games. The deal is the same, the trump call is the same, following suit is the same — and then every family has its own rule about what happens to a won trick, or whether the trump is announced out loud.

None of these are wrong. They are variants, and the honest thing for a Court Piece app to do is to let you pick. In RUNG they are switches on the table you create, and the server enforces exactly the set you chose — so nobody argues about the rules halfway through a hand.

Single sir — the standard game

Sir (also sarr) is the word for a trick. In single sir, the default, the winning side collects the four cards the moment the trick is complete and stacks them face down. Thirteen tricks, counted one at a time, seven to take the hand.

This is the ruleset on the how to play page, the one you get in Quick Play, and the one every ranked match in RUNG uses. If someone says "normal rules", this is what they mean.

Double Sir (do sari)

In Double Sir, a won trick is not collected. It stays face up in the middle of the table and the pile grows. To take the pile, one side has to win two tricks in a row.

The exact rule, as RUNG enforces it:

• A won trick is left in the middle instead of going to the winner.
• A team collects the whole pile only by winning two consecutive tricks, and the two wins must be by the same player — your partner winning the next trick does not continue your run.
• A pile is never collected off its first two tricks, so the earliest a pile can be swept is on the third trick of that pile.
• Whoever wins the last trick of the hand takes everything still sitting in the middle.

What it does to the game. Double Sir punishes single lucky wins and rewards control. Trumping a trick you cannot repeat achieves nothing — you have won four cards that are still on the table for the other side to take. The winning pattern is to hold the lead: win a trick, then win the next one from the lead you just earned.

It also makes the final trick enormous. A pile of sixteen or twenty cards riding on trick thirteen turns a comfortable hand into a coin flip, so keeping one high trump back for the last trick is a genuine strategy rather than a flourish.

Playing Double Sir for the first time? Lead your long suit and keep two trumps, not one. Your aim is back-to-back tricks, and that needs two cards, not a single hero card.

Band Hukam (hidden trump)

Hukam is the trump suit; band hukam means "closed trump". The caller looks at their first five cards and names the suit as usual — but only they know what it is.

How it resolves:

• The caller names the hukam privately after five cards. Their own screen shows it; nobody else's does.
• Everyone else learns the suit the moment the first card of that suit reaches the table, however it gets there — led, followed or thrown.
• Nothing else changes. Following suit is still compulsory, tricks are still won the same way, and the trump still beats everything. You simply do not know which suit is doing it.

What it does to the game. It turns the first few tricks into a reading exercise. The caller's partner is playing half-blind and has to deduce the hukam from what the caller leads and what they refuse to spend. Meanwhile the opposition is watching for the one suit nobody seems willing to throw away.

As the caller, the trap is being too clever: if you never touch your own trump suit to protect the secret, you give up the tricks it was supposed to win.

Free-for-all (no follow suit)

The follow-suit restriction is dropped completely: any card, any trick, any time. Trump whenever you like, even when you hold the led suit.

This is not Court Piece in any strict sense — following suit is the rule the whole game is built around — and it is off by default in RUNG. It is here because plenty of friends genuinely play this way, usually with children at the table or when nobody wants to think very hard. As a way to teach the shape of trick-taking to someone who has never played cards, it is better than it sounds.

Kot and the continuation rule

A kot (also kote, coat) is all thirteen tricks. It is worth double a normal hand, and it is the reason a decided hand sometimes keeps going.

• Normally the hand ends the instant a side reaches seven tricks.
• If the trailing side is still on zero, play continues, because the sweep is still live.
• One trick to the trailing side kills the kot and ends the hand immediately.

Tables that dislike the suspense turn continuation off and simply stop at seven. RUNG leaves it on, because the 13–0 is the best thing that can happen to you in this game and it deserves to be played out.

Match length

A hand is worth a point — traditionally a court. How many points make a match is a table decision.

At two points, a RUNG match is usually two or three hands — five to ten minutes — and a kot wins it outright.

Redeal on a bad five

Some tables let the caller throw the hand in if their first five cards contain no court card— no Jack, Queen, King or Ace. The cards go back, the same dealer deals again.

It exists because the caller is forced to choose a trump from five cards, and a five-card hand of nothing but low spot cards is a sentence rather than a decision. Agree on it before the first deal, not after someone sees their five.

Side by side

Double Sir and Band Hukam stack: a hidden trump with a growing pile in the middle is the hardest version of this game there is, and it is two taps to set up.

Which should you play?

• New to Court Piece? Single sir, against bots, until the follow-suit rule stops needing thought. Start in practice mode.
• Playing with family who argue about rules? Create a private room and set them explicitly. The server is the referee.
• Want the real challenge? Double Sir with Band Hukam on, four humans, nobody allowed to talk.
• Playing ranked? Single sir, always — ranked matches use one ruleset so the ladder means something.