The four avoidance contracts
Each penalty card carries a fixed cost: the King of Hearts is −75, each Queen is −25, each Diamond is −15, and each trick taken in Collections is −10. A full Diamonds contract puts 13 cards worth −195 on the table; a full Collections contract, 13 tricks worth −130.
Suit management is everything — the whole skill is off-loading danger onto opponents before it lands on you.
Doubling the King and Queens
Doubling is optional and switched on at setup. Any player may double the King of Hearts or a Queen, and doing so cuts both ways: whoever ends up eating the doubled card pays twice — −150 for the King, −50 for a Queen — while the player who doubled it collects the card’s face value as a bonus, +75 or +25, for successfully feeding it away.
Self-doubling is a separate setting. Eat a card you doubled yourself and you take the full doubled penalty with nobody collecting a bonus; if another player forced it on you, they take the bonus instead. In partners, a teammate never collects that bonus off their own partner.
Trix, and winning the match
The Trix contract is the only one that pays: 200 points for going out first, then 150, 100 and 50. It cannot be doubled.
Scores accumulate across all twenty contracts and the highest total wins. In partners, teammates’ scores are combined, and you can optionally enable a mercy rule that ends the match early once one team leads by an agreed margin.