Rung (Rang) Card Game: Play Rung Online

The Rung card game, also spelt Rang and written رنگ in Urdu, starts with one player looking at five cards and naming the rung: the suit that beats the other three for the whole hand. Then the rest of the cards come, thirteen each, and two partnerships race to seven tricks. Many players know the same game as Court Piece, Coat Pees or Hukum, and you can play Rung online here, free in your browser, against bots or with friends.

A hand of Rung, from the call to the seventh sir

Say you are the hakem, the caller, and your five cards are the ace, nine and four of hearts, the king of spades and the six of clubs. Three hearts is the longest suit you can see, so you call hearts. Eight more cards arrive and you find out how good that call was.

Your partner sits across from you, an opponent on either side. When a suit is led you must follow it if you can. When you cannot, you may cut with a heart or throw something away; cutting is never compulsory. Each sir (trick) goes to the highest heart in it, or to the highest card of the suit led if no heart was played, and whoever wins it leads the next. The first side to seven sirs takes the hand.

Rung or rang: one word, two spellings

Rung and rang are two English spellings of one Urdu word, رنگ, which means colour. At the table it means the trump suit, and many players simply name the whole game after it. Pagat.com, the card games reference, notes that in Pakistan the game is often known as Rang or Rung. Whether your family says rung or rang, it is the game English write-ups usually call Court Piece.

Kot and bavan

Call the rung and sweep all thirteen sirs and it is a Court: kot, coat, same word. Sweep all thirteen when the other side called the rung and it is a Bavan, the 52 every table talks about. At the table those are scores of 13 and 52. Our app keeps match points instead: a Court on your own call is worth 3, and the defenders’ sweep, which the app calls a Goon Court, is worth 4.

Who calls the rung next

The call follows the result. Win the hand you called and you keep calling; lose it and the call crosses to the other side; sweep all thirteen on your own call and it moves across to your partner. A hakem whose opening five hold nothing above a Ten can ask for a redeal instead of naming a weak rung.

Four ways to play Rung

Classic is the everyday game. Single Sir ends the hand as a Court when one side takes the first seven tricks in an unbroken run. Double Sir stacks tricks into a pile that only comes across when the same player wins two in a row. Hidden Rung has no caller at all: the first off-suit card played sets the rung for the hand, and tricks pile up as in Double Sir.

Words you will hear at a Rung table

At a Rung table the words are Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi or Hindi, even when the players are speaking English. The hakem is the player who names the rung; the word means ruler. A sir is one trick, four cards, one from each player. A kot, court or coat is all thirteen tricks taken by the side that called the rung, and a bavan (fifty-two) is all thirteen taken by the side that did not. The cards have their own names too: ikka for the ace, badshah for the king, begum for the queen and ghulam, or gola, for the jack.

Rung tips that win hands

Judge your five cards by length as well as faces: four small cards of one suit often make a better rung than two high cards of another, because length is what still wins tricks late in the hand. Count the rung as it falls. There are thirteen, and once they are gone a long side suit wins tricks on its own. And when you are void you do not have to cut: throwing a worthless card is often better than spending a high rung on a trick your partner was already winning.

Play Rung online, free

Rung online here takes one tap, with no download and no sign-up. Play against bots at Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert, take a quick match with players who are online now, or make a private room and send the link on WhatsApp so your table is together in seconds. Bots fill any seat your friends cannot, and if someone drops out mid-game a bot takes their seat so the match carries on. It works the same on a phone, a tablet or a computer.

Also known as Court Piece · Coat Pees · Hukum · حکم · Rung · رنگ · Troeff Call · Trump