Callbreak is a trick-taking card game for exactly four players, each playing for themselves. Everyone gets 13 cards. Everyone promises how many tricks they will win. Then everyone tries to keep that promise. Spades are always trump, and five rounds decide the winner.
That is the whole game. The parts that trip up new players are the ones most pages skip: you are frequently forced to play a particular card, and missing your call costs you the whole call, not the difference.
These are the rules as they are actually played in Nepal and India. Where other tables do it differently, it says so. The game is also called Call Break, Call Bridge, and लकड़ी / lakdi in parts of India — same game, local names.
Keeping score by hand? Callbreak Score Tracker does the maths for all five rounds, free and offline.
The table, the deck and the deal
| Thing | Callbreak |
|---|---|
| Players | Exactly four, no teams |
| Deck | One standard 52-card deck, no jokers |
| Cards each | 13, dealt one at a time |
| Trump suit | Spades, permanently |
| Card order | Ace high, then K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 |
| Tricks per round | 13 |
| Rounds per game | 5 |
| Scores | Four separate scores, one per player |
The deal passes to the right, and play goes counter-clockwise: the player to your right plays after you.
Five rounds is the standard in Nepal and India. It is not universal. The reference description of Call Bridge on Pagat gives no fixed end in its base form and lists five-deal and ten-deal games as alternatives. Most apps and most home tables settle on five, then add rounds if nobody wants to stop.
Spades are permanent trumps
Any spade beats any card of any other suit. The 2 of spades beats the ace of hearts. Within a suit, the higher card wins, ace down to 2.
There is no "spades must be broken" rule in Callbreak. You may lead a spade whenever you like, including to the very first trick of the round. This is one of the most common things people import wrongly from Spades, which does have that rule.
Some groups add a house rule banning a spade lead to the first trick. Pagat lists it as a variation. It is a house rule, not the base game: agree it before the deal or not at all.
Everyone calls a number before a card is played
After the deal, each player looks at their 13 cards and says out loud how many tricks they will win. Everyone calls before the first card hits the table.
The minimum call is where rulesets split, and it matters:
| Ruleset | Minimum call | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| Common Nepali and Indian play | 1 | 13 |
| Pagat's Call Bridge | 2 | 12 is the highest sensible call |
So no, you cannot call zero in either version. There is no nil bid in Callbreak the way there is in Spades. If your table has never discussed it, ask whether 1 is allowed before someone calls it and starts an argument.
The four calls do not have to add up to 13. Usually they add up to more than 13, because everyone is optimistic, which guarantees somebody misses. Some tables run the opposite house rule: if the four calls sum to less than 10, the cards are reshuffled and dealt again.
Playing a trick, and the rules that surprise people
The player to the dealer's right leads the first card. Everyone else plays one card. Highest spade wins the trick; if no spade was played, the highest card of the led suit wins. The winner leads the next trick. Thirteen tricks, then the round is scored.
The part that catches people out is that you often have no choice about which card to play. Work down this list in order:
- Follow the led suit if you can, and if you can beat the card currently winning, you must. Ducking with a low card is not allowed.
- Void in the led suit? You must trump. If a spade is already down, you must play a higher spade if you hold one.
- Only when you can do neither may you throw anything away.
One corollary saves a lot of shouting: if somebody has already trumped and you still hold the led suit, any card of that suit is legal. You cannot beat a spade with a heart, so the must-beat rule has nothing to bite on.
One sub-case is a table decision rather than a fixed rule. A spade is already winning, you are void in the led suit, and every spade in your hand is lower than the one winning. Must you waste it? In the Nepali and Indian form, no: a trump that cannot win is a trump thrown away, so any card is legal. Pagat lists the matching variation, and plenty of tables make you throw the small spade anyway. Agree it before the deal.
A trick, played out
Bimal leads the 7 of hearts.
- Ashma holds the 4 and the 10 of hearts. The 10 beats the 7, so she must play the 10. She may not throw the 4.
- Tulsi holds the 2 and the queen of hearts. The queen beats the 10, so the queen it is.
- You have no hearts at all. You must trump. No spade is down yet, so any spade is legal: play the 3 of spades, your lowest, and you win the trick with it.
A second trick, with an overtrump
You lead the ace of hearts.
- Ashma is void in hearts, so she must trump. She plays the 2 of spades and is now winning the trick.
- Tulsi is also void in hearts. A spade is already down, so she must play a higher spade if she has one. Holding the 5 and the jack of spades, she has to play one of them.
- Bimal is void in hearts and holds no spades either. Now, and only now, he may throw anything he likes.
This compulsory must-beat and must-trump behaviour is the biggest single difference between how Callbreak is played in Nepal and India and how the conservative English-language description reads. Pagat's base Call Bridge says a player who can follow suit is not obliged to head the trick, and files compulsory overtaking under variations. In Nepal and India it is the norm, not a variation. If you learned the game from an English page and your table keeps telling you your card was illegal, this is why.
The full rules for when you cannot follow suit go through the awkward cases one by one.
How a round is scored
At the end of 13 tricks, compare what each player called with what they took.
| What happened | Round score | Example |
|---|---|---|
| You took exactly your call | Plus your call | Called 4, took 4 → 4.0 |
| You took more than your call | Your call, plus 0.1 for each extra trick | Called 4, took 6 → 4.2 |
| You took fewer than your call | Minus your whole call | Called 4, took 3 → −4.0 |
Three things follow from that table, and all three change how you should play.
Extra tricks are worth almost nothing. Ten of them equal one called trick. Winning tricks you did not call for is not a strategy, it is a rounding error.
Missing your call costs the whole call, not the shortfall. Call 4 and take 3 and you score −4, not −1. Compare the other direction: call 3, take 4, and you score 3.1 instead of 4.0. Calling one under costs you nine tenths of a point. Calling one over costs you the whole call.
Some pages disagree about that penalty. You will find pages claiming a call of 4 that brings in 2 tricks scores −2. That is not the mainstream rule. The standard is that you lose the whole call. If your table plays the softer version, that is fine: settle it before the deal, not after somebody has gone down.
Pagat's Call Bridge scores differently again, for contrast: a call succeeds if you make it or one more; calls of 8 and above score a flat 13, or 16 at some tables; and one variation drops overtrick value entirely and caps calls at 8. Same game, different arithmetic. Do not assume the table you sat down at uses the numbers you learned. More detail in Callbreak scoring rules, explained.
One round, scored for all four players
Calls were: you 4, Bimal 3, Ashma 2, Tulsi 4. That is 13 called against 13 available, which is unusually tidy.
| Player | Called | Took | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| You | 4 | 5 | 4.1 | Made it, plus 0.1 for the extra trick |
| Bimal | 3 | 3 | 3.0 | Exact |
| Ashma | 2 | 2 | 2.0 | Exact |
| Tulsi | 4 | 3 | −4.0 | One short, loses the whole call |
Tulsi and Bimal took the same three tricks. Bimal called three and scored 3.0; Tulsi called four and scored −4.0. Same tricks, seven points apart. That is Callbreak in one line.
Five rounds, and a winner
Here is the same table across a full game, with running totals after each round.
| Round | You | Bimal | Ashma | Tulsi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4.1 | 3.0 | 2.0 | −4.0 |
| 2 | 3.0 | 4.0 | 3.1 | −3.0 |
| 3 | −5.0 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 3.1 |
| 4 | 4.0 | 3.1 | 2.0 | −5.0 |
| 5 | 3.2 | −3.0 | 4.0 | −4.0 |
| Total | 9.3 | 9.1 | 14.1 | −12.9 |
Ashma wins, and look at how. She never called more than 4 in the whole game and she never went negative once. Tulsi called 4, 3, 3, 5, 4 — bigger every time it mattered — and finished 27 points behind. Careful calling beats brave calling over five rounds.
Notice also how small the extra tricks are. Across five rounds, all the 0.1s added together came to 0.6 points between four players. They decide ties, not games.
House rules worth agreeing before you deal
None of these are wrong. They are all played somewhere. The mistake is assuming everyone at the table knows which set you are using.
| House rule | What it does |
|---|---|
| Minimum call of 1 or 2 | The Nepali and Indian norm is 1; Pagat's Call Bridge says 2 |
| Must-beat when following suit | Standard in Nepal and India; a listed variation elsewhere |
| Missed call scores minus the whole call | The mainstream rule; some pages describe minus the shortfall |
| Redeal if the calls total under 10 | Cards are reshuffled and everyone calls again |
| A call of 9 that stands | Scores 9.1 and closes the round there |
| Call 8 and take exactly 8 | An instant win for that player |
| No spade lead to the first trick | A restriction some groups add |
| No wasting a small trump | If all your spades are lower than the winning one, throw anything |
| Redeal if a player holds no spades | Another listed variation |
| Announce a void before play | Rare, but it exists |
Settle these in the first minute. The arguments this game actually produces are almost all house rules that nobody declared.
Keeping the score without arguing about it
Adding 4.1, then −3, then 3.2, five times over, for four people, on the back of an envelope, is where most Callbreak evenings go wrong. Somebody always remembers the total differently.
I built Callbreak Score Tracker to take that job off the table. It keeps the sheet for a real game of four. You enter the calls, tap how many tricks each player took, and the round total and running score are done. It also plays full games against bots, with the must-beat and must-trump rules enforced, so it is a way to learn the play without holding up a real table. Both halves run the same scoring code, so the numbers match.
Get the app: Callbreak Score Tracker, free and offline, on iPhone and Android.
Common mistakes
Calling what your hand looks like instead of what it will win. A hand full of queens and jacks in side suits wins far fewer tricks than it looks like it should. Count winners, not high cards. There is a method for it in how to count your hand before you call.
Ducking a trick you were required to win. If you hold a card of the led suit that beats the current winner, you must play it. Not playing it is an illegal move, not clever defence.
Forgetting you must trump when you are void. Throwing away a useless heart because you want to keep your spades is not allowed. If you have no cards of the led suit and you hold a spade, the spade goes down.
Chasing extra tricks. After you have made your call, extra tricks pay 0.1 each. Two extra tricks you did not need are worth 0.2 points, and getting them usually means risking the tricks you did need.
Playing your high spades too early. Spades are the only cards that beat everything. Spent on trick two, the ace takes a trick a small spade would have taken, and it is gone by trick eleven, when the hand is decided.
Assuming everyone knows the same rules you do. Minimum call, missed-call penalty and the must-beat rule all vary. Ask first.
Questions people ask
Can you call zero in Callbreak?
No. The common Nepali and Indian ruleset sets the minimum call at 1, and Pagat's Call Bridge sets it at 2. There is no nil bid the way Spades has one.
Do the four calls have to add up to 13?
No. They usually add up to more, which is why somebody almost always goes negative. Some tables use a house rule that redeals when the calls total less than 10.
Do spades have to be broken before I can lead them?
No. That is a Spades rule, not a Callbreak rule. You may lead a spade at any time, including to the first trick, unless your table has agreed otherwise as a house rule.
What happens if I take more tricks than I called?
Each extra trick adds 0.1 to your score. Call 4 and take 6 and you score 4.2. They almost never decide a game on their own.
What is the highest score possible in one round?
13.0 — call 13 and take all 13 tricks. A call of 12 that brings in all 13 scores 12.1, which is lower, because an extra trick is worth 0.1 and a called trick is worth a full point.
Do I have to win a trick if I can?
In Nepal and India, yes. If you can follow suit and beat the card currently winning, you must. Pagat's base description of Call Bridge does not require it and lists compulsory overtaking as a variation, so an English-language page may tell you otherwise.
How many rounds is a game of Callbreak?
Five in the standard Nepali and Indian form, 13 tricks each. Pagat's base description sets no fixed end and mentions five-deal and ten-deal games. Most apps default to five and let you keep going.
Is Callbreak the same game as Call Bridge or lakdi?
Yes. Callbreak, Call Break, Call Bridge, lakdi, ghochi, kathi and locha are the same game under regional names, with small rule drift between them. "Tash" or "ताश" just means playing cards, not this game specifically.
Keep reading
- Callbreak: the complete guide — rules, scoring and strategy in one place.
- Callbreak scoring rules, explained — every case, with worked numbers.
- When you cannot follow the suit — the trump rules in detail.
- Callbreak bidding strategy — how many tricks to actually call.
- Callbreak vs Spades — the rules that genuinely differ.
