Cul-bas
Cul-bas or Culbas is a very old card game, of great simplicity, in which chance plays the largest part. It takes its name from a phase of play in which, unable to play, a player is required to lay down the rest of his cards, face up on the table. In 1828, M. Lebrun, author of the Manual of games of calculation and chance, published by Roret, took the initiative of changing the name of this game to Cou-bas, stating that "the reader would be grateful for this innovation". Méry, in 1847, in The Referee of Games took a very different approach to the vocabulary.
Cul-bas, whose rules first appeared in the middle of the 17th century in The House of Academic Games, is probably the origin of Papillon, whose own rules were not printed until 1725, in the Universal Academy of Games. As for the Italian Scopa, which presents itself as an evolution of Papillon, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to date it to the 18th century.
1. Number of players and deck of cards
Cul-bas is preferably played with five or six players, using a deck of 52 cards. It is also possible to play with seven or eight.
With three or four players, a deck of 32 cards is preferable, in order to avoid too many hands without a winner.
Cards have no particular value, and are considered only for what they represent: a king, a jack, an eight, an ace, etc.
The suit of the cards is not taken into consideration.
2. Length of the game, buy-in, stakes
The game is played for a number of rounds agreed at the outset by the players. A round is finished when all players have dealt. A hand is the period of play extending between two deals. When play passes to the next dealer, the hand changes. A round is thus made up of a number of successive hands equal to the number of players.
At the start of the game, each player receives twenty tokens and a desired quantity of chips – rectangular plaques worth twenty tokens each. Four chips and twenty tokens are generally enough to play ten rounds with three players, eight rounds with four, six with five, five with six or seven, and four with eight players. The number of chips should be adjusted to the number of players and rounds one intends to play, and a separate bank may be set up with a supply of tokens to exchange for players' chips during the game, should they run short.
No stake is placed at the start of each hand. The wager builds up over the course of play by forming a pot.
If the pot has not been won after the last hand of the game, the players may decide, unanimously, to keep playing until there is a winner, but failing agreement, the pot will be divided among the players. It is nevertheless preferable to settle this matter by agreement among the players at the start of the game.
3. The deal
To determine who will be the first dealer of the game, each player draws a card from the deck spread out, face down, on the table. The dealer is the one who draws the lowest card, in the following descending order:
– for a 52-card deck: king, queen, jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, ace;
– for a 32-card deck: king, queen, jack, ace, 10, 9, 8, 7.
He shuffles the cards and has them cut by the player to his left, then deals five cards to each player, going to the right – three and two, or two and three.
Once this is done, he lays out, in one or two rows, in the middle of the table, the next eight cards, face up.
He then keeps the remaining cards to his right, face down; these form the stock and will not be used during this hand.
To the right of the dealer will also be placed a basket or any other receptacle intended to hold the chips and tokens that will make up the pot.
If a player receives four cards of the same rank, he returns them to the dealer, who gives him four new cards from the stock. The discarded cards are placed under the stock.
4. Play, captures, cul-bas
The first to play is the player seated to the right of the dealer.
Each player plays in turn, counterclockwise.
Only one card is played per turn, allowing the player to capture one of the cards laid out face up on the table. A capture consists of the card taken from among the exposed cards and the card played by the player. Captures are kept, face down, by whoever made them. They are made according to the following rules:
– a card can only be captured by a matching card: a king by a king, a jack by a jack, a 10 by a 10, and so on for all other card types;
– when a player holds three cards matching another card exposed on the table, he captures that card by laying down the three matching cards from his hand. For example, with three 10s, one may capture the fourth exposed 10, and so on.
If a player has no way to make a capture in accordance with the two preceding rules, he must go cul-bas, that is, lay down the rest of the cards he holds and add them, face up, to the cards already exposed.
A player who has gone cul-bas no longer takes part in play until the end of the hand. The first player who, through captures, manages to get rid of his five cards is the winner of the hand, which then ends immediately, and the players who still have cards in hand go cul-bas.
When a hand is finished, play moves on to the next one. The player who was first to play, and who is seated to the right of the basket, becomes the dealer. He gathers up all the cards, shuffles them, has them cut by the player to his left, and deals them as before, going to the right.
4.1 Case where no card remains exposed
If a player has just captured the last exposed card, the next player still in the game must go cul-bas, being no longer able to make a capture, and the following player continues play as normal.
4.2 Hand without a winner
If none of the players has managed to get rid of his five cards through captures – all players having been led to go cul-bas – there is no winner for that hand.
5. Forming the pot, and its winner
When a player is led to go cul-bas – whatever the reason – he must immediately pay into the basket as many tokens as he had cards remaining in his hand.
All the tokens and chips contained in the basket make up the pot.
The pot is everything the winner of the hand takes.
If there is no winner for a hand, the pot carries over to the next hand.
6. Winner of the game
When the game is over, each player works out his tally by subtracting from the number of tokens he holds those he started with and, where applicable, those he may have acquired from the bank during play to restock. A chip is worth twenty tokens.
The result obtained allows the players to be ranked.
Joseph Méry
Joseph Méry, journalist and writer, was clearly what one might call a bon vivant. His writings in his collection of game rules, The Referee of Games, published in Paris by Gonet in 1847, are a delight. The following quotation, a critique of a sanitized society, taken from the introduction to the rules of Cul-bas contained in this work, is one example.
"Here is a game that reeks of its origin a mile off; it was indeed in favor among our ancestors in the days – the happy days – when prudishness about words had not yet spoiled the admirable and naive language of Montaigne. That is why Cul-bas is no longer played; for how, indeed, could such a coarse name be allowed into our drawing rooms, after a dinner at which great care would have been taken to call an artichoke bottom a wallet? [...] So Cul-bas is dead; malicious tongues have killed it; but its rules have been preserved; [...]" (the rules follow)
Méry then continues, after setting out the rules:
"'This game,' says the author of the rules printed by the widow Savoye, at the sign of Hope, in closing, 'is highly entertaining, and enjoyed privately by men of the sword, who feel no shame about words when it comes to pleasant things.'" What wit is wasted in the dust of these old books, which no one touches, except those who live off them and never speak of them!"
References
The House of Academic Games, Paris, Loyson, 1655
M. Lebrun, Manual of games of calculation and chance, Roret, Paris, 1832
Joseph Méry, The Referee of Games, Gabriel de Gonet, Paris, 1847
Information about the page
Published on 21 August 2006
Revised on 25 November 2021
Author: Philippe LALANNE
Le Salon des jeux - Académie des jeux oubliés
