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Bid Whist

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Bid Whist is a partnership trick-taking game, played with a deck of 52 cards plus two jokers, which should be clearly distinguishable from one another. The object of the game is to score 7 or more points, or to drive your opponents negative by more than 7 points.
You deal out the cards clockwise, one at a time, 12 to each player. You also deal out the remaining six cards during the deal, face-down to a kitty in the center of the table. (The timing of dealing to the kitty is up to the dealer.)

The bidding. Bid Whist has five possible trump suits; the regular four suits and no-trumps. Each suit can also be defined as uptown or downtown. At uptown trumps, the order of the cards goes from ace to 2 with the big joker and little Joker the boss two trumps. At downtown trumps, the Jokers retain their pole position, but the other cards rank from ace to king — so the king is the least important card. At no-trump both uptown and downtown, the order is identical to the order trumps, but both jokers are irrelevant.

Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, each play gets one chance to bid the number of tricks (or books) more than 6, which he intends to take. For example, a bid of 3 (the smallest legal bid) represents the intention to take 9 tricks total. To make a bid, you have to outbid the previous call.
The order of bids is 3 (uptown or downtown), 3 no-trump, 4 (uptown or downtown), 4 no-trump, and so on, all the way up through 7 no-trump.

If none of the first three players bids, the dealer must act. Because no bonus exists for bidding exactly to your contract, the dealer always opts for the minimum, namely 3, be it uptown, downtown, or no-trumps.
Note also that some element of every call is left to the imagination. If you specify you are going uptown or downtown, you do not name the trump suit yet. If playing at no-trump, you do not specify whether you are going uptown or downtown. The catch is that you have to do so immediately after winning the auction.

How can anyone bid for 7 tricks, or 13 in all, when everyone only has 12 cards? Well, whoever wins the auction gets to take up the kitty, add those cards to his hand, and throw away any six cards. Those discards now represent his first trick — so he is already well on his way to his contract.

The scoring. If you successfully achieve your contract by making more tricks than you bid for, you score as many points as you took tricks over six. So if you bid 3 uptown and made ten tricks, you score 4 points. If you go down in your contract by failing to make what you contracted for, you lose the number of points equivalent to your bid and may go negative. Your opponents get nothing. No-trump bids are scored double.

Dealing with jokers. At no-trump, the jokers are a mere cipher. You can only play them when you are out of a suit, at which point you can discard them. If a joker is led to a suit, the next player can play anything he likes — and that card serves as the lead for the trick.
Some people play that the joker can be played at any point in the hand, not just as a discard, in which case they become far more useful by allowing you to preserve your honors, instead of having to sacrifice them under a high card.