Parett

While the exact inventor of the game is unknown, Parett was almost certainly first played on the islands of Anastius & Horasa, potentially inspired by older card games from Luat na-Bonswi and Jotama. The game spread on trade ships across most of the world and is a popular past-time in bars and cafés. It has even made its way into politics, a more formalised version making up part of the bureacratic process on Anastius & Horasa.

The etymology of the name, Parett (rhyming with 'ferret'), is much disputed. One theory holds that it comes from a distortion of 'parrot', in reference to the players announcing 'ready' one after another. Another attributes it to a mispelling of Captain Edna Perette, who may have introduced the game to Din Talin.

The game is also often played for cash, with each player contributing to a central pot and claiming money instead of points after each round. Nowadays, it is more often played with rocks or – for the more daring – rations.

• 1 standard deck of playing cards (without jokers)
• 4 willing participants

Parett is played in a series of rounds — usually 4 or 8, or until a player reaches a certain number of points, usually 16 or 32. Each round has three phases: drafting, betting and trick-taking.

• Each player draws 5 cards, looks at them, then passes 1 of the 5 to the player on their left
• Each player draws 5 more cards and chooses 2 of the 10 to pass to their left
• Each player draws a final 3 cards and passes 3 of their 13 to the left

In the first round, pick a player to start betting. From then on, the player who bet last in the previous round starts the betting. Going round clockwise, each player makes a bet on how many tricks they think they’ll win. If the bet is successful at the end of the round, the player will get that many bonus points. If unsuccessful, the points are subtracted instead. (So if a player bets 1 and wins 1, they get 1 bonus point. If they bet 3 and win 4, they get -3 bonus points. A bet of 0 has no effect either way.)

Each player selects a set of cards from their hand to play (but does not play them!). Once a player has selected, they say ‘Parett’ to indicate their readiness. Once all four players have cried ‘Parett’, they lay down their selected cards. The highest set wins that trick. This continues until three people have run out of cards. Once a player has run out of cards, they are ‘out’ of the remaining tricks and do not play any cards.

All sets of cards played must be all the same suit (flush) or all the same value (matching), with between one and four cards in a set. Comparing hands works as follows (apply the highest rule possible):

• More cards beats fewer cards
• Matching beats flush
• (For flushes)
  • Spades beats hearts beats clubs beats diamonds
  • Higher top card beats lower top card
• (For matching and singletons)
  • Higher card beats lower card
  • Spades beats hearts clubs beats diamonds

Each trick won is worth 1 point, and bets give bonuses as explained above. (To return to those examples, betting 1 and winning 1 gets 1+1=2 points; betting 3 and winning 4 gets 4-3=1 point.)

• A❤️ beats K♠️
• 5♣️beats 5♦️
• 6♦️3♦️beats A♠️
• 2♣️2♥️beats Q♣️9♣️

There will be a Discord bot on the Contagion Discord server which will allow you to play Parett. The bot has permissions to send messages, create threads and read messages which mention it. While playing, the bot will collect inputs via direct messages and temporarily stores some information about your Discord account to do so. This data is stored only for the duration of a game, and no data is collected unless you play a game. The bot is hosted on fps.ms and the source code is available upon request.