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Minnesota Whist is a 4 player partnership game played with a deck of 52 playing cards. The play is broken down into hands. Hands are played until the game is over. You form a team with the player across from you and accumulate points from each hand played. The game ends when a team reaches 13 points. The team with the highest score wins.
There are four stages to a hand: dealing, bidding, playing, and scoring.
At the start of the game the dealer is chosen randomly. From then on, the deal rotates clockwise until the game ends. The cards are dealt evenly to the four players, each player receives 13 cards.
The bidding determines whether the hand is played high (also called grand) or low. When playing high, players will try to take tricks. When playing low, they will try to avoid tricks. The bidding begins with the player to the left of the dealer and rotates clockwise.
Each player chooses a card to indicate their bid: a black card indicates the player wants to play high; a red card indicates the player would prefer to play low. The bid card is placed face down on the table. After all players have determined their bid card, the cards are turned up one at a time starting with the player to the left of the dealer. As soon as a black card is turned up, no more cards are turned up. The hand will be played high. If all cards are red, the hand is played low. All bid cards are now returned to the players' hands. This determines the contract for this hand as either high or low. The declarer is the player who turned up a black card (also known as the bidder). There is no declarer when the contract is low. The hand now enters the play stage.
Note, it is rare, but if you want to bid with a black card and have no black cards below a 10, you may use two red cards to indicate a black bid. The same is true when you have no red cards below a 10: you may use two black cards.
The play consists of 13 tricks. Each trick consists of 4 cards, 1 card from each player. For each trick, there is a leader, a suit led, and a winner. The leader is the player who played the first card. The suit led is the suit of the card played by the leader. The winner of the trick is determined by the highest card played of the suit led. The ranking of the cards in a given suit is: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, T, J, Q, K, A.
When the contract is high, the player to the right of the declarer makes the first lead. When the contract is low, the player to the left of the dealer makes the first lead (there is no declarer). When leading, any card from one's hand may be led.
Play continues clockwise to the left with each player playing a card in turn. Players must play the suit led if they have it; otherwise, they may play any card from their hand.
After each player has played a card on the trick, the winning player takes the trick and places it aside until the scoring stage. This player is the leader of the next trick. The play stage continues until players have no cards left in their hands.
After the hand has been played out, the number of tricks taken by each team is counted.
Scoring is based on odd tricks. An odd trick is a trick in excess of 6 tricks. The declaring teams receives 1 point per odd trick when playing a high contract. The defending team receives 2 points per odd trick when playing a high contract. When the contract is low, there is no declaring team. The team that took fewer tricks receives 1 point per odd trick taken by the opponents.
Here are a few examples. If the contract is high and the declaring team takes 8 tricks they will receive 2 points (2 odd tricks); tf the defending team takes 9 tricks and will receive 6 points (3 odd tricks, 2 points per odd trick). If the contract is low and a team took 9 tricks (3 odd tricks), the other team will receive 3 points.
The scores for the hand are added to the total game scores. The first team to reach a total of 13 points wins.
There are many web sites discussing Minnesota Whist. Here are a few that we found helpful.
NeuralPlay Minnesota Whist offers many features to help you learn and improve your play. These features may be enabled, disabled, and/or adjusted in settings. The features include the following.
The following rule options are offered to customize NeuralPlay's Minnesota Whist to your liking.
NeuralPlay computer players offer 6 levels of play. Play at level 1 is reasonably easy and good for beginners. Play at level 3 should be fun for most players. Play at level 6 will be the most challenging.
The AI bots employ different AI methods depending on the level. Levels 1 and 2 use simple methods to provide an introduction to beginners. We will not describe them in detail here.
Level 3 uses a rule-based AI. The AI consists of rules such as: "In 3rd seat, do not trump partner's high card" and "In 4th seat, play just high enough to take it when an opponent is winning", etc. We find the rules work quite well and can provide good play.
Levels 4+ use Monte Carlo Simulation to determine the best play. Basically, the AI will deal out the unknown cards randomly. The AI will then try each legal play and play the deal to the end to get a result. This is repeated for many deals of the unknown cards. The average result for each legal play is computed and the legal play with the best average result is chosen.
Levels 4+ differ in how many times the unknown cards are dealt out. In general, the more deals the more accurate the simulation. This results in better quality plays. The trade-off is that more deals take more time, play may be slower on level 6 than level 4 depending on the device.
Since levels 4+ do not use rules, you may observe either surprisingly good plays or odd mistakes that may seem not to follow any logical rules. Overall, our tests show that the levels are better than the rule-based level 3. We also find the randomness makes the computer feel a bit more human-like and fun.
If you prefer a more consistent, logical, and predictable partner AI and/or opponent AI, then level 3 may be best.
We are continuing to research improvements and new computer AI algorithms. We continue to update the bots as we develop improved algorithms.
See Settings -> Hand Sorting. You can change the rank order, suit order, and choose to alternate red and black suits.
Go to the Main Screen and choose Menu -> Reset.
These terms are used in bridge games. You are always South and your partner is always North. The terms You and South are used interchangeably.
Claim means you will take the remaining tricks. When your hand is clearly high, you may claim the remaining tricks to speed up play. If the claim is successful (the AI will check), you will receive the remaining tricks and the hand will end.
Please contact us at support@neuralplay.com.