CALLBREAK

About Call Break

Call break (also known as spades, locha, lakadi or lakdi) is a trick-taking card game played by 4 players with a set of 52 cards of a deck. Call break is played in many countries around the world and is very popular in south east Asian countries Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. Though there are some variations in rules from place to place, in general call creak card games follow these rules:

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 Card Ranking and Trump Suit 

The cards within the same suit are ranked based on their face value with 2 being the smallest and Ace being the highest: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K and A. Of the four suits of cards in a standard deck ( ♣ Club, ♦ Diamond, ♥ Heart and ♠ Spade), one suit is selected as the trump suit. Spade is usually selected as the trump suit though any other suit can be used. Even the smallest card of the spade ranks higher than the highest card of any other suit. 

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Game Play

The standard game of call break requires exactly 4 players. At the beginning of the game, each player draws a card from a freshly shuffled deck to decide the seating and dealing order. The player who draws the highest card can choose the seat first and will be the first dealer. The player on the right side of the current dealer will be the dealer of the next round with the first dealer also being the dealer of the last round. 

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Rounds, Calls and Tricks

 A call break card game consists of 5 rounds. In each round, the dealer distributes 13 cards to each player. For the deal to be valid, each player must have at least one spade and at least one card with face value higher than 10. If the deal is invalid, the same dealer repeats the deal. 

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Once the players receive their 13 cards, they make a call ( at-least 1) in the counter-clockwise order - starting from the player on the right side of the dealer.  

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The player who made the first call of the round throws the first card to start the first trick of the round. The suit of the card first thrown in a trick is called the trick-suit. The subsequent player have to either throw a card based on these rules: 

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• If a player has one or more higher ranking cards of the trick-suit on hand, they must throw one of them
  
• If a player does not have a higher ranking card of trick-suit but have cards of same suit, he/she must throw a card of the same suit
  
• If a player doesn't have a of trick-suit on hand but has trump-suit cards on hand, they must throw one of the trump suit cards
  
• If a player doesn't have a card of trick-suit or trump-suit, the player can throw any card from the remaining cards on hand 

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Once each of the 4 players throw one card for the trick, the player with the highest card gets 1 point and will become the player to start start the next trick. After all 13 tricks are over, each player's score for the round is calculated as follows:

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• If a player wins exactly the same number of tricks as the call, the score for the round will equal the call value (e.g. 3.0)
  
• If a player wins more tricks than the call, the extra score beyond the call will be added as a decimal value. For example, if a player called 3 but won 5 tricks, the score will be 3.2 (call value + extra / 10)
  
• If a player wins less number of tricks than the call (meaning the player's call was broken), the score will be negative of the call value (e.g. -3.0)