To play Oh Hell you need a standard card deck with 52 cards (from aces to twos).

In each hand, players declare how many tricks they will take and they score points for taking an exact number of tricks. Each game consists of a certain number of hands. Oh Hell is a trick-taking card game for 3-7 players. On Oh Hell you always try to take an exact number of tricks.

There is also a group of games where you have to avoid taking tricks (Hearts). If there are many variants and names, how can we say if a game is Oh Hell variant? Well… in most trick-taking games you have to take as many tricks as possible (it’s always good to take even more than in your contract). He learned this game from Steven Spielberg. Former President of USA – Bill Clinton – is known as Oh Hell player. But the game is quite popular and even tournaments are organized in USA since 90s. One of the Polish books about games describes Oh Hell under the name of “Makao”, but Makao is also a different game (known as Mau-Mau in English speaking countries).Īs you can see, it can be really hard to trace Oh Hell’s history. Whist is different game, even though there is a clear kinship between Oh Hell and Whist. To make things more complicated, I saw mobile apps to play Oh Hell but under the name of… Whist. What’s more, Oh Hell is known around the world under many names. And there are many variants of the game, with varied scoring, biding and additional rules, although Oh Hell is a relatively young game. This is something that many Whist or Bridge players could invite. The idea on which the game is built is quite obvious. I think its possible that many similar games appeared separately in a few parts of the world.

It’s hard to say when the game was invented or by who, but we can be sure it derives from Whist. Oh Hell is a really nice card game, but I can’t say much about its history. This game is called Oh Hell and you just have to give it a try. Now imagine there’s a card game that has features and benefits of Bridge and Poker. And why do people love Poker? Because its surprising, risky and unpredictable. Why do people love Contract Bridge? Because it’s so logical, elegant and strategic.

Rules to oh hell card game