Penneech
English card game
Penneech or peneech, sometimes called penicth, is an unusual historical English card game for two players played with hands of seven cards. English point-trick games are rare anyway, but the unique feature of this game is that the trump suit changes with each trick. Parlett describes it as a "jolly little two-hander".
History
Penneech was alluded to in Pepys Ballads, II, 98 (1625-1640) by Samuel Pepys, but its rules were first described by Charles Cotton in the 1674 and first edition of The Compleat Gamester, and repeated in all subsequent editions until 1754. There are no other descriptions of the game, although it is mentioned in passing by Holme in 1688 and described as "a game formerly in use" in 1822.
Card games historian David Parlett notes that English point-trick games are rare and knows of no other game in which the trump suit changes from one trick to the next. He tested it extensively in order to reconstruct the rules.
Cards
A standard 52-card pack of English pattern, French-suited cards is used with Aces ranking high.
Rules
The following is a description based on Cotton's rules, supplemented by Parlett who tested the game extensively:
Deal
Players cut for the first deal, the lower card winning (Aces low for this purpose). The dealer deals 7 cards each, individually, and turns the next for trumps, placing the rest face down as the stock.
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This entry incorporates text from “Penneech” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.