All Fours is one of the oldest card games still played in the English-speaking world. It takes its name from the four points up for grabs every hand: High, Low, Jack and Game. Over three and a half centuries it travelled across the Atlantic, split into a family of related games, and found its strongest home in Trinidad and Tobago.
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1600s
A game from Kent
The earliest known rules are in Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester of 1674, which says All Fours was “very much play’d in Kent”. Cotton describes a two-player game with a 52-card pack, usually played to 11, where turning up a Jack scored for the dealer. He also notes that “the Dealer hath a great advantage”.
The game is also where the name “jack” for the knave comes from.
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1700s–1800s
Across the Atlantic
All Fours reached North America and became hugely popular there in the 1800s, under names like Seven Up, Old Sledge and High-Low-Jack. It gave rise to a whole family of games, including Pitch, Pedro and California Jack. In England it lived on in pub leagues in Lancashire and Yorkshire.
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Trinidad and Tobago
The national card game
In the Caribbean, and above all in Trinidad and Tobago, All Fours became a four-player partnership game with its own rules: kicks for the turned-up card, begging for a new trump, hanging the Jack for 3, and a race to 14, with deal and play going anticlockwise. It is now known as the national card game of Trinidad and Tobago, and it’s sometimes called just “Fours”.
Tobago has its own twist: there, turning up a Two kicks 2 points instead of the Six.
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Today
Wherever Trinis are
Trinbagonians abroad took the game with them, and there are clubs in the diaspora such as the Manitoba All Fours Association in Canada. And now it’s online: the All Fours + app and AllFours.tt let you sit at a table with partners and rivals from Port of Spain to Toronto.
What makes the Trini game different
Compared with the old English game and its American cousins, Trinidad and Tobago’s All Fours is played like this:
| Rule | Trinidad and Tobago | The older game |
|---|---|---|
| Players | Four, in two partnerships sitting opposite | Usually two |
| Winning score | 14 points | Commonly 11, or 7 for Seven Up |
| Kicks | Turning up an Ace scores 1, a Six 2 (a Two in Tobago) and a Jack 3 | Only a turned-up Jack scores, for 1 |
| Begging | The player right of the dealer can beg; the dealer gives 1 point or runs the cards for a new trump | Similar begging, between two players |
| The Jack | Win your own Jack for 1; capture the other team’s and you “hang” it for 3 | 1 point to whoever wins it |
Want to try it? Learn the rules with a practice hand, or play now.
Sources
- All fours (card game), Wikipedia
- All Fours, John McLeod, pagat.com
- Charles Cotton, The Compleat Gamester (1674)