Dehla Pakadदहला पकड

Players and cards

Dehla Pakad is for four players in two fixed teams, partners sitting opposite. It uses a standard 52-card pack with no jokers. Aces are high, then king, queen, jack, ten and down to two.

Only the four tens count. Winning tricks matters only because the tricks carry the tens, and to settle a hand when the tens are shared.

The deal and the trump

The dealer gives everyone five cards. Nobody chooses trumps: the player on the dealer's left draws one card at random from their own five, without looking, and turns it face up for everyone to see. Its suit is trumps for the whole hand.

The drawn card goes back into that player's hand and is played like any other card. Then the dealer deals four more cards to everyone, and four more again, so each player has thirteen.

Playing the tricks

The player on the dealer's left leads the first trick. Everyone in turn plays one card, going to the left, and the winner of each trick leads the next.

• Follow suit: if you have a card of the suit led, you must play one.
• If you cannot follow suit, play any card you like. You never have to trump.
• The highest trump in a trick wins it. With no trump in it, the highest card of the suit led wins.

Each trick is taken straight away by the team that won it, with any tens inside.

Winning a hand

When all thirteen tricks are played, each team counts its tens.

• Three or four tens: that team wins the hand.
• Two tens each: the team with more tricks wins. Thirteen tricks cannot split evenly, so seven or more decides it.
• All four tens is a kot. All four tens and all thirteen tricks is a double kot.

The match goes to the first team to win five hands. You can choose three or seven instead. Kots are counted separately on the score slip.

Who deals next

The losing team deals the next hand. If the dealer's team lost, the same player deals again; if the dealer's team won, the deal passes to the player on the dealer's left, who is on the losing team.

After a kot, the deal goes instead to the partner of the player who would have dealt. A double kot cancels that push.

Where these rules come from

Dehla Pakad belongs to the family of tens games known in India as Mendikot or Dehla Pakad. The default rules here are the ones written down from players in Sarlahi, in Nepal's Terai-Madhesh, by Ganesh Gautam and Raju Kumar Yadav (Pulchowk Campus) in their 2026 study of the game, which they call Dahal Jeet:

• Deal in batches of five, four and four, with the trump drawn blind from the first player's own five cards and shown to everyone.
• No obligation to trump, and every trick taken at once.
• Three tens win; two each is decided on tricks; kot and double kot.
• The losing team deals, a kot pushes the deal to the loser's partner, and a double kot cancels the push.

The two options come from the wider family as Pagat (John McLeod) describes it. Trump by the first card off-suit is the cut hukum way of Mendikot. Taking tricks two in a row is how Pagat's Dehla Pakad works. The players in Sarlahi keep a running tally with no end, so the match length is this table's choice.

Trump: first card off-suit

Nobody draws a trump. The hand starts with no trumps, and the first player who cannot follow suit makes trumps with the card they play. That card already counts as a trump in that trick, so it usually wins it. This is the cut hukum way of playing Mendikot.

Taking tricks: two in a row

Tricks are not taken straight away. They stay in a pile in the middle until one player wins two tricks in a row, and then that player's team takes the whole pile, tens and all. Whoever wins the last trick takes whatever is left in the middle.

Length of the match

First team to three, five or seven hands.

House rules this table does not use

Some groups let a player choose trumps, play with a closed trump card laid face down (band hukum), or score a whitewash for winning every trick. This table keeps to the rules above.