Bezique Squares

From around 1920 onwards, the British publisher Foulsham known for their wide range of popular books on games and puzzzles (and for Old Moores Almanack) began printing a booklet called Thirty One Patience Games; Single and Double Pack by Tom King.

                                            (c. 1928)

The book had a preface by Charles Platt called ‘A Brief History of the Pack of Cards’ which was both irrelevant and historically incorrect in almost every single detail. The selection of Patience games does however include a fleeting description of a rarely mentioned variant of Poker Squares called Bezique Squares.

The idea is a simple one. You deal out 25 cards one at a time face upwards, and you place each card somewhere in a 5 x 5 matrix laid out on the table. You may place each card anywhere within the grid pattern, but you are not allowed to move any card once it is placed on the table. Once the 25 card grid is complete, you then score each row and column of the tableau according to whichever scoring system you have chosen to use.

The best known version of this Solitaire is ‘Poker Squares’ which makes use of the rules for ranking Poker hands. There are two different systems American and British. There are however two other versions of this Patience game - ’ Cribbage Squares’  which makes use of the rules of Cribbage for scoring the hand, while ‘Bezique Squares’ uses the standard scoring combinations found in the game of Bezique. The big difference of course is that you need to use the double Piquet pack of 64 cards, when playing Bezique Squares. You also need to remember to turn over a trump card before you start drawing cards.  

The scoring features available in Bezique Squares are:

Four Aces - 100

Four Kings -   80

Four Queens -   60

Four Jacks -   40

Double Bezique - 500

Single Bezique -   40

Trumps  (A.T.K.Q.J) - 250

Trump Marriage (KQ) -   40

Common Marriage         -   20

7 of Trumps -   10

The sample deal below would score:

  500  pts - Double Bezique

  250  pts - Trump Sequence (A.T.K.Q.J)

  100  pts - Four Aces

    80  pts - Four Kings

    60 pts - Four Queens

     40 pts - Four Jacks

     80 pts - Trump Marriages  x 2

     40 pts - Common Marriages  x 2

     20 pts - 7 of Trumps x 2 (1 as turn-up and 1 in tableau)

1170 pts in total