Court Piece is the 4-player card game where one player sees five cards, calls the rung (trump), and two partnerships race to seven of thirteen tricks. It is also known as Rung, Coat Pees, Hukum and Troeff Call. Play it online free in your browser against bots, or with friends in a private room, with no download and no sign-up.
Four players sit down, partners facing each other. One of them, the hakem, picks up five cards and has to call the rung, the trump suit, from those five alone: say the ace, nine and four of hearts with a king and a six in other suits, and hearts it is. Then the other eight cards arrive. Take seven of the thirteen tricks and the hand is yours; sweep all thirteen and the table will be talking about it for a week. That is Court Piece, the partnership card game of South Asian family gatherings, and Rung, Coat Pees and Troeff Call are regional names for the same trick-taking game. Play it here free against bots or with friends in a private room, with no download and no sign-up.
You can play Court Piece online right here in the browser. Tap Play vs Bots for an instant hand against bots from Easy to Expert, or create a private room and send the link to three friends. Rung online works on phone, tablet or desktop: nothing to download, no account needed, and a bot quietly fills any seat somebody leaves. On Android you can also get Rung Court Piece on Google Play.
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In Pakistan, tash (تاش) simply means playing cards, so a tash game or a "tash wali game" can be any game played with an ordinary pack. Court Piece, which many families call Rung, is one of them: four players and one standard 52-card pack, with a called trump and thirteen tricks. If you know it as rang tash or tash rang, it is the same game. You can play this tash game online here for free, against bots or with friends in a private room, with nothing to download.
Four seats, two partnerships, partners facing each other across the table. Deal and play both run anti-clockwise, and because partners sit opposite, the turn alternates sides round the table: you, an opponent, your partner, the other opponent. At a real table, who calls the first hand is settled by a toss: each player picks one card from the pack and shows it. The highest card's team takes the call, and a tie just means tossing again.
One 52-card pack, no jokers, thirteen cards each, nothing held back, but they do not all arrive at once. The hakem gets the first five, looks at those and names the rung; the rest of the pack follows afterwards. The suit is committed on five cards out of thirteen, with eight of your own still to come. There is no bidding and no number of tricks to promise: you name a suit, and that is the entire call. Most tables say rung; turrup is the correct Urdu, and hukum is widely heard too. A hakem whose opening five hold nothing above a Ten can ask for a redeal, one per deal.
A sir is one trick, four cards, one from each player, and it is the unit everything is counted in. The opening lead can be any card. After that, hold the led suit and you must follow it. Void in it, and your whole hand is legal: trump, or throw away something useless. Trumping is never compulsory. Highest trump takes the sir, or the highest card of the led suit if nobody trumped (Ace high, then King, Queen, Jack, Ten and down to the Two), and a card of neither suit cannot win however high it is. A discarded ace is just a discarded card. Whoever wins leads the next one.
Seven sirs of the thirteen and the hand is yours. Win your own call and you keep it next hand; lose it and it crosses to the opposing side; take all thirteen and it moves to your own partner. Worth settling before the first card: published summaries often call seven tricks a kot, while in urban Sindh, Karachi especially, a Court means all thirteen and nothing less. The full Court Piece rules cover both.
What changes between the four modes is when a trick actually becomes yours.
The standard game, and the pick if you just want a hand of Rung. Each trick is credited as it is won, and no bonus lands at seven: take the first seven straight and play carries on, because the other side is still on nothing. Let them take one and it settles as an ordinary win; only all thirteen is a Court here.
Tricks stand alone as in Classic, with one rule the other modes lack: take the first seven in an unbroken run and the hand ends there as a Court. One stolen trick breaks the run and the hand plays on as an ordinary one. That target makes it the clearest mode to learn on. Don't spend high trumps on tricks you would win anyway, and watch which suits your partner is short in.
Tricks stop settling one by one. They stack into an unclaimed pile that comes across only when the same player, not the partnership, wins two in a row, so a partner winning in between resets it too. Say the pile is empty when North wins a trick; you win the next, then East wins two in a row. East takes all four for East and West. Win tricks one and two and it still will not collect: the pile stays open, you stay on the sir, and two in a row from trick three takes the lot. An Ace rule sits on top, picked at setup: under Trump Ace or Any Ace, a trick won by that Ace cannot claim the pile.
Nobody calls. The hand starts with no trump; the rung is set by the first off-suit card played, so it can only come from someone who cannot follow the led suit, never the leader. That card is trump the instant it lands, including the trick it is played in, and if nobody ever runs short the hand stays trumpless. Tricks bank as in Double Sir, with no second-trick block. Nobody holds the caller's advantage, so there is no Court and no Bavan, and seven tricks ends the hand on the spot.
Calling the trump is an advantage, so the ladder pays you less for using it: sweeping a hand the other side called is worth four times a Court. The app keeps a match in points instead of the ladder: 1 for the calling side winning a hand, 3 for its Court, 3 for the defenders beating the call and 4 for their sweep.
Most of the hand is decided before a card is played. You name the rung from five cards, so judge them by shape rather than by faces: four small hearts are usually worth more than two high spades, because length is what still matters on the tenth trick.
Then count trumps. Thirteen exist, and every one played is one that cannot beat you later. Good players know the trick on which the table runs dry, because from then on a long side suit wins tricks on its own; nothing off-suit can beat it. Lead that suit early too, while the others still hold it and have to follow. The small cards you are left with at the end are the ones that take tricks.
Ducking is the other half of the same skill. When you are void you are not obliged to trump. Throwing a worthless card is legal, and often better than spending a high trump on a trick nobody wanted. The winner of a trick leads the next one, so ducking to let your partner take one also hands them the lead at the moment it is useful.
Your discards are your one honest signal. The suit you throw tells your partner where you are short and what to lead back, and noticing which suits your partner has stopped following is worth more than anything said out loud. Reading the cards is fair. Everything off them is the grey area every table settles for itself.
Defending is not the consolation prize. The scoring ladder pays a defending sweep far more than the caller's: fifty-two against thirteen. In Single Sir there is a cheaper way to defend still. Steal one early trick and the unbroken run of seven is broken, the Court is gone, and the hand plays on.
Almost none of this vocabulary gets translated, even when the table switches to English. The words you will hear most are below; the fuller list is on Court Piece Terms.
If you grew up calling it something else, you were not calling it wrong. At home it is Rung (رنگ), because one named suit outranks the other three for the whole hand. Hukum (حکم, command) is just as widely used, and it is the name that gives away the family tie to Hokm, the Iranian game: the same deal, the same called trump, a different ritual for crowning the caller, and its own way of scoring.
Then the family travels. Surinamese, Guyanese and Dutch players know it as Troefcall. Troef is Dutch for trump, so the name is half Dutch and half English, and you will see it written Troef Call or Troeff Call too. Same bones, different details. Troefcall plays clockwise; Court Piece runs anti-clockwise. Troefcall finds its first caller by dealing one card at a time until a Jack appears, Hokm by the first Ace dealt face up, Court Piece by a four-card toss that picks a whole team.
Even under one name the house rules shift. The Court Piece rules here were recorded from play: urban and rural Sindh, Punjab, and players in Germany.
Our sister site, CardsLobby, has more trick-taking games, free in the browser against bots or with friends in a private room. Call Break is the one most Court Piece players already know: four players, spades always trump, and everyone bids the tricks they will take. Twenty-nine (29) is the partnership game played across India, Bangladesh and Nepal, with a hidden trump and points for jacks and nines. Spades is the American cousin: partners, bids, and spades as the fixed trump. Hearts turns it around, and you try not to take hearts or the queen of spades. All seven games are on CardsLobby.