luz

About this board game

luz is a 2014 trick-taking game for 3–4 players that takes about 45 minutes, challenging you to bid on tricks while unable to see the face values in your own hand.

Players hold their cards so that the values can be seen by everyone else, but not by themselves. The suits, represented by colors, are painted on both sides of each card, so every player can identify the suit of every card in their hand.

Before play, another player sorts your cards by color first and then by number in ascending order. This arrangement gives you a way to reason about your hand, but it does not reveal everything. Since not all cards are dealt, the information available to the table is incomplete.

• Hidden values: Your opponents can see the numbers in your hand, while you cannot.
• Visible suits: Card colors remain identifiable from either side.
• Imperfect information: Use other players’ hands and the known card distribution to infer your own.
• Trick-taking bids: Predict how many tricks you will win and try to meet your bid—or foil another player’s contract.

Success in luz depends on combining the clues in your own suits with the face-up values visible in other players’ hands. Every bid is an exercise in deduction under uncertainty: estimate what your unseen values might be, decide how many tricks your hand can claim, and watch for opportunities to disrupt an opponent’s prediction.

With its unusual orientation of hidden and visible information, luz turns a familiar trick-taking premise into a distinctive test of inference, memory, and judgment.