120s (Auction) Rules

120s is a partnership trick-taking game. You and the player opposite you play as a side, and you're trying to win tricks. Every trick is worth points, and one trick in each hand is worth double. Before a hand is played, one side bids for the right to name the drumpf suit, and takes on the risk of falling short.

The first side to reach 120 points wins the game. That's where the name comes from.

• Players: exactly 4. Not two, not six. The game doesn't work with any other number and the table won't deal one.
• Partnerships: two fixed sides of two. Partners sit opposite each other, so the turn alternates between the sides right round the table.
• Scores are kept by side, not by player. You and your partner have one score between you, and it's the side that reaches 120, not a person.
• Deck: a standard 52-card pack. There are no jokers and nothing is stripped out.

• Everyone gets 5 cards, dealt one at a time round the table, starting with the player to the dealer's left and finishing with the dealer.
• The kitty is dealt with the hand. Each of the first four times round the table, once every player has their card, one card goes face down in the middle. That's the kitty (4 cards, and all four are face down). The fifth time round goes to the players only, so the last card of the deal is a player's and no more go to the kitty. Nobody sees the kitty: not the dealer, not the player who ends up with it. It belongs to whoever wins the bidding, and it's turned over in that player's own hand and nowhere else.
• The rest of the pack stays face down on the table: 28 cards, once everyone has their five and the kitty is laid out. It isn't dead either: it's what the discard draws from later.
• The deal passes one seat to the left after every hand that gets played out.

1. There is one round of bidding, starting with the player to the dealer's left and going once round the table. The dealer bids last, which is worth something, because they've heard everyone else first.
2. There are four bids: 15, 20, 25 or 30. The bids go up in fives. There's nothing in between and nothing above.
3. A bid has to beat the bid standing, and since the bids go in fives that means the smallest raise is 5 points: after a 15 the cheapest thing left to say is 20, after a 20 it's 25, and once someone has said 30 everybody after them passes.
4. From 90 points up, the smallest bid your side may make is 20. Once you're in reach of the game you can't sneak in on a 15. It's a restriction on the number you may say, not an order to say one. See The Endgame below, where the rest of it is.
5. You can always pass. Nobody is ever forced to bid, including the dealer, and that is true at every score.
6. The high bidder names the drumpf suit.
7. Know what you're bidding for. There are only 30 points in a hand, so a bid of 30 is a bid to take every single trick. Miss one and you're Down. A bid of 15 is half of them: three ordinary tricks, or two if one of the two is the 10-point one. 20 and 25 are the two steps in between, and they're what you raise with when somebody has bid ahead of you.
8. "Down" is the word for missing your bid, and it says exactly what happens: you go down what you bid. Bid 25 and take only 20 and your side loses 25 points off its score. It's in the Scoring section below, with the numbers.

The high bidder names a drumpf suit. Then, and this is the part people forget, everybody gets to improve their hand, but the player who won the bidding improves it twice over: they get the kitty to pick through and the same throw-and-draw everybody else gets.

1. Drumpfs first, then the kitty. The high bidder names the suit, and then picks up all four kitty cards. That order matters, because you name drumpfs without knowing what's in there.
2. That leaves the bidder holding nine cards, and the bidder throws away as many as they like: four, or six, or all nine. Then the dealer deals them back up to five. Low drumpfs included: if you'd rather have three fresh cards than the two and the four of drumpfs, throw them. Four is simply the fewest you can throw, because nine cards don't come down to five any other way.
3. Everybody else throws away any number of their five cards (none, one, all five, whatever they like), and the dealer deals them back up to five from the rest of the pack. Same rule as the bidder's, just from a smaller hand.
4. Players do this one at a time, starting with the player to the dealer's left and finishing with the dealer, the same way round as the deal and the bidding.
5. Throwing nothing is a perfectly good move, and it's the usual one when you're already holding drumpfs. The bidder is the one seat that can't throw nothing (nine cards have to come down to five), but beyond that first four, it's their choice like anybody else's.

The high bidder leads to the first trick, not the player to their left, and not whoever discarded last. The bidder bought the right to set the drumpf suit and to start the hand.

Below those three, the drumpf suit runs in its own order, and here's the rule nobody gets right first time: after the Queen, the little cards run the other way round in red than they do in black. In a black drumpf suit the 2 is the highest of them and the 10 the lowest; in a red drumpf suit the 10 is the highest and the 2 the lowest. (The 5 isn't in either list, because it's already the top drumpf.)

A suit that isn't drumpfs runs Ace, King, Queen, Jack and then the little cards, and the little cards flip by colour again: low-to-high in black, high-to-low in red.

1. The high bidder leads to the first trick; after that, whoever won the last trick leads the next.
2. Play goes round the table, one card each, four cards to a trick, five tricks to a hand.
3. Any drumpf beats any non-drumpf. Among drumpfs, the higher drumpf wins.
4. If no drumpf is played, the highest card of the suit that was led wins. A card of any other suit can't win the trick at all, however big it looks.

Cards have no point values in 120s. Points come from tricks and from nothing else.

• Every trick is worth 5 points to the side that wins it…
• …except one: the trick taken by the highest card that actually wins a trick that hand is worth 10 instead of 5. That's usually the 5 of drumpfs, but not always, and it isn't hardcoded: if the 5 was never dealt to anybody, the 10 goes to whichever winning card was highest, and in the very rare hand where no drumpf wins a trick at all it goes to the highest plain card that won one.
• So there are exactly 30 points in every hand: four tricks at 5 and one at 10.

• Hands are dealt one after another, and the side scores add up as you go.
• The first side to reach 120 at the end of a hand wins. Scores are only checked when a hand finishes, so nobody wins in the middle of one.
• If both sides go past 120 in the same hand, the side that bid wins, even if the other side finished with more points. They took the risk; they get the game.
• And you have to have bid to win at all. That is the third of the three endgame rules in the next section, and it is the one that decides more games than any tie-break does.

Two sides can both be within a hand of 120 at the same time, and 120s settles that with something better than a tie-break. Three rules do the job, and all three are how this table plays today.

• A side that hasn't won a bid and made it is capped at 115. It scores normally all the way up to 115 and stops there. Points past 115 don't count for a side that hasn't taken a bid and made it. Win a bid and make it and the cap is gone for the rest of the game, including for that very hand, which scores in full.
• From 90 points up, the smallest bid you may make is 20. Once you're in reach of the game you can't sneak in on a 15. You may still pass: nobody is ever forced to bid, at any score. You just never win if you keep passing. You can sit on 115 passing all night if you want to.
• You cannot win a game you did not bid. In Shannon's words: "You must bid and win what you bid to win the game." A side that gets to 120 without ever having made a bid doesn't win, and the game carries on.

Going Down never lifts the cap: the rule is bid it and make it. And the cap is a ceiling, not a safety net: it stops you climbing past 115, it does nothing to stop you falling from it.

Four of the rules above are choices, not fixed law. Whoever opens a table sets them, and everyone who sits down plays them: the host's rules win. Your own settings govern every table you open, including the games you play on your own against the computer, because a solo table is a table you host. You can read what a table is playing before you join it: it is written in full on the room's line in the lobby, and the table itself carries a short reminder of anything it plays differently in its bottom-left corner.

Leave them all alone and nothing changes. Every default below is the rule described further up this page, so a table that chooses nothing plays the game this page describes.

• When everybody passes. By default the hand is thrown in and the same dealer deals again. You can instead have the deal move on to the next player, or have the dealer pick a bid or re-deal: when everyone else has passed, the dealer can pick a bid, or not bid and re-deal, and it is the same dealer who deals again.
• Scores below zero. By default a side can go below zero, so going Down 30 from 10 leaves you at −20, "in the hole". You can instead have nobody go below zero: a side that would drop under nought sits at nought. It applies to both sides or to neither; it is the table's rule, not one player's.
• Kitty Teaser. Off by default, so all four kitty cards are face down. Switch it on and the top card of the kitty is turned face up before the bidding: the last card dealt to the kitty, which lies on top. Only the top card. The whole table sees it, including anyone watching. The other three stay face down and stay secret.
• Shuffling the thrown cards back in. Off by default, so a card you throw away stays thrown. Switch it on and everything anybody throws is shuffled and goes back into the pack at the bottom, so it can never run short. The cards nobody has seen yet stay on top and are dealt first, so you are never dealt straight back a card you have just thrown away. At a four-player table the pack never gets that far down, so the setting changes nothing there.

A table's rules are settled when the cards are dealt and stay settled until that game is over. A host changing a setting halfway through cannot change the hand on the table; it applies to the next table they open.

The one thing left in this section is in development. It is a table size this game doesn't offer yet, written down here so you know it's coming and so nobody mistakes today's behaviour for the final word. It does not describe what happens if you sit down today; everything above this point does.

• Count the top three: the 5, the Jack and the Ace of hearts. Once you know where they are, you know how the hand is going.
• Bid the smallest number that wins the auction, not the biggest one your hand could carry. A bid you make scores every point you took, not the bid, so 15 made and 25 made on the same hand score exactly the same, and the 25 is the one that can put you Down. Open at 15; keep 20 and 25 for outbidding somebody.
• 20 and 25 are raises. They exist so you can take a hand off a player who bid 15 without having to promise all five tricks. Going 15 → 20 costs you 5 more if you're Down and nothing at all if you make it.
• Bidding 30 is bidding to take all five tricks, and being Down costs you the whole 30, so it wants a hand you can see every trick in. The top three drumpfs are only three tricks; you need your partner for the other two, and you can't see their hand.
• Count what "Down" costs before you say the number. Down 15 from 60 is 45; Down 30 from 60 is 30. The bid you say is the bid you lose.
• The dealer bids last and hears everybody first, which cuts both ways. If it's gone round to you at 25, you're deciding between 30 and nothing.
• Count the top three: the 5, the Jack and the Ace of hearts. Once you know where they are, you know how the hand is going.
• Don't waste the discard. Everyone at the table is improving their hand, not just you, and a hand that looked strong before the discard often isn't afterwards.
• Bid for the kitty, not just for your hand. Four unseen cards is a lot of help, and it is help nobody else gets. A hand that's one drumpf short of a 15 is worth more than it looks, because winning the auction is the only way to see those four. And it costs you nothing in the draw: you throw at least four to come back down from nine, but you may throw more, low drumpfs included, and the dealer deals you back up to five like everybody else.
• Name drumpfs before you see the kitty, so name them for the hand you've got. You can't pick the suit that suits the kitty: you don't know what's in it yet, and it may well be four cards of nothing.
• Leading a low drumpf smokes out the top three, but remember they can be held back against it. That's exactly what reneging is for.
• You may drumpf a plain suit you could have followed. Doing it early can win you a trick your partner would otherwise have had to spend a drumpf on.
• The 10-point trick is worth two ordinary ones. If you hold the highest drumpf, think hard about when to spend it.
• Watch the colour of the drumpf suit. If you play red and black drumpfs the same way round, you will lose tricks you didn't need to.
• The computer players open at 15 and use 20 and 25 to raise, for exactly the reason in the first tip. They play a sensible game, not a clever one: they don't count the drumpfs still out and they don't bid your hand differently from anybody else's.
• Watch the endgame rules, because they change how the last two hands are played. You have to take a bid and make it to win at all; from 90 up the smallest bid is 20; and sitting on a big score without bidding is not a way to win, it's a way to stop at 115. If you're the one who's capped, the hand you've been waiting for is the one you have to bid on.
• If you bid 30 you're leading a drumpf, so count that lead before you say it. On a 30 your first card has to be a drumpf, and you don't get to feel the hand out with a plain card first.