Oh Hell Score Keeper
Deal in your table
Name your players, set the deal, and pick a scoring style. Bids and tricks update standings live as you play.
Deal in your table
Name your players, set the deal, and pick a scoring style. Bids and tricks update standings live as you play.
Deal the same number of cards to everyone and turn one card up to name the trump suit. Starting left of the dealer, each player bids a number of tricks from zero up to the hand size. Then play proceeds like any trick-taking game: you must follow suit if you can, and the highest card of the led suit or the highest trump wins the trick.
Oh Hell is also called Contract Whist, Up and Down the River and other names depending on where you play, and the bidding and trick-taking are the same idea.
The dealer bids last and may not bid a number that makes the total of all bids equal the number of tricks in the hand. That guarantees at least one player will miss their bid.
The first hand has the maximum number of cards, then each round deals one fewer until the last hand has a single card. You can choose to stop there, or go back up again for a longer game. With a standard deck the maximum hand size is the number of cards divided evenly among the players, up to 10 in Tallyhoo.
Oh Hell is a trick-taking game built on bidding. Each round, every player bids how many tricks they expect to take, then plays the hand and tries to take exactly that many. Hit your bid and you score; miss it and you score little or lose points. The player with the highest total after the last round wins. The scoring style you pick at setup decides exactly how many points each hand is worth, and the five styles are below.
Tables score Oh Hell in several ways, so Tallyhoo lets you pick a style at setup:
Common / Standard: make your bid and score 10 plus the tricks you took. Miss it and score 1 point per trick taken, with no bonus.
Simple / Exact-Only: make your bid and score 10 plus the tricks you took. Miss it and score 0.
Negative Penalty: make your bid and score 10 plus your bid. Miss it and lose one point for every trick you missed by.
The Zilch Twist: make your bid and score a flat 10. Miss it and lose 10, however far off you were.
Progressive / Exponential: make your bid and score 5 plus the square of your tricks. Miss it and lose the square of the tricks you missed by, so big misses hurt.
Standard is the most common. Pick Negative Penalty or Progressive if you want misses to cost points, and Zilch for a simple pass-or-fail score.
Oh Hell is played a little differently from table to table. At setup you can choose how the game is shaped. The scoring styles are covered on the Scoring tab.
Down to 1, then back up: the hand shrinks one card each round until a single card, then grows again back to the maximum. The one-card hand is only played once, so a game with a 10-card maximum is 19 rounds long.
Down to 1 only: the hand shrinks to a single card and the game ends there, which is a shorter game. A 10-card maximum is 10 rounds.
Choose how many cards the first hand has. Tallyhoo starts you at the most that can be dealt evenly to your players, up to 10, and won’t let you go higher than the deck allows. A lower maximum makes for a shorter game.