How to Play · Lesson 1 of 10

First Hand Basics

Learn the upcard, trump, bowers, bidding, and leading your first trick.

How a Hand Works

A game of Euchre is played across multiple hands, each consisting of five tricks. The team who calls trump is on offense and must win at least 3 of those 5 tricks to score a point — falling short of that is a euchre and lets the opponents on defense score 2 points.

Before any cards are played, one team must call trump — the suit that outranks all others for the entire hand.

Trump and the Bowers

Any trump card beats any non-trump card, no matter how high. The trump suit has its own special rank order:

Right Bower — the Jack of the trump suit. Highest card in the hand, unbeatable.
Left Bower — the Jack of the same-color suit as the trump suit (i.e. if HEARTS is the trump suit, the left bower is the Jack of DIAMONDS because it is the other red suit. It becomes trump and is a HEART, not a DIAMOND for the current hand and ranks second-highest).
After the bowers: Ace, King, Queen, 10, 9 of trump in descending order.
All non-trump off suits rank normal: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9 in descending order.

If Hearts are trump: J♥ (Right), J♦ (Left), A♥, K♥, Q♥, 10♥, 9♥

The Upcard and Bidding

After the deal, one card is flipped face-up. Starting left of the dealer, each player can Order Up to accept that suit as trump, or Pass.

Ordering Up forces the dealer to take the upcard and discard one card face-down. Your team needs 3 tricks to score.
If all four players pass, the upcard is turned face-down and each player may name any other suit as trump in a second round.

To call trump, you need to ensure that your hand (with your partner's help) is strong enough to take at least 3 of the five tricks, otherwise you should pass (not call trump).

Playing Tricks

The player left of the dealer leads the first card of the hand. Three rules govern every trick:

Follow suit — if you hold a card of the led suit, you must play one (remembering that the left bower is actually in the trump suit when following suit).
Void play — if you have none of the led suit, you may play any card, including trump.
Winner — highest card of the led suit wins, unless trump is played, in which case the highest trump played wins.

The winner of each trick leads the next one. After five tricks the hand is scored.

Lessons with Guided Tutorials Are Found in the App

Read about key Euchre topics and when you're ready, try a guided hand that walks you through the game concepts on the actual table.

Get Euchre Ace on the App Store