Shpella is a classic Albanian partnership trick-taking card game for 4 players. You and your AI partner (North) play against two AI opponents (East and West). The goal is to win 7 or more tricks each round to score a point — win all 13 tricks for a Shpella, worth 2 points. First team to 7 game points wins the match.
Setup: A standard 52-card deck is dealt equally — 13 cards per player. The last card dealt to the dealer reveals the trump suit for that round (shown with a gold border). The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick.
Playing: Click a card to select it (it rises up), then click again to play it. You must follow the led suit if you have cards of that suit. If you're void, you may play any card, including trump. The highest trump wins the trick; if no trump was played, the highest card of the led suit wins. The trick winner leads the next trick.
Scoring: Win 7–12 tricks to earn 1 point. Win all 13 tricks (a Shpella!) to earn 2 points. The match continues until one team reaches 7 game points.
From Beginner to Cyborg ☠ — seven difficulty levels control how smartly the AI plays, from basic random play up to near-perfect card counting and partnership signalling.
Shpella is the classic Albanian partnership trick-taking card game, played two-against-two with a trump suit and a target of winning the majority of tricks each round. The heart of it is teamwork you can't talk about — you and your AI partner have to read each other through the cards alone, signalling strength and weakness by what you play and when. Manage your trumps, time your high cards, and try to take 7 or more tricks a round. Seven AI difficulty levels run from loose beginners up to sharp partnership play.
The tricks are confusing at first — I'll admit they were for me — and then something flips, and you realise Shpella isn't really a card game at all. It's a combinations game. It's about tracking what's been played, what's still out there, and which cards your partner and opponents must be holding. If you've got a memory for cards, you're already halfway to being good at this. The rest is just learning to trust what the count is telling you.
A fresh daily challenge lands every midnight, and your best run is saved on your device. Shpella belongs to the same family of partnership trick-takers as Belote and Klaverjas, so if the trump-and-teamwork rhythm clicks, try Klaverjas next — it's the Dutch cousin of this game.
Shpella is one of the most obscure games in the entire catalog, and that's precisely why it's here. It's an Albanian partnership trick-taking card game — four players, two teams, thirteen tricks a round — and when I went looking for a good online version to learn from, there essentially wasn't one anywhere. So we built our own. That's the whole story of this page: a little-known game that deserved a proper table finally getting one. Cliko exists partly for the games everyone already knows, and partly for exactly this — the games that would quietly vanish from the world if nobody bothered to build them.
The shape of the game, quickly, so the advice lands: you and your AI partner sit North-South against two opponents, thirteen cards each from a standard deck, and the last card dealt reveals the trump suit for the round. Win seven or more tricks and your team scores a point; sweep all thirteen and that's a Shpella — worth two. You must follow the led suit whenever you can; when you're void, anything goes, including trump, and the highest trump takes the trick over everything else on the table.
Which sets up the mistake I most want to talk you out of, because it's the one that makes new players lose winnable rounds: undervaluing the low cards. Players look at a hand and see only its aces and kings, mentally discarding everything below a ten as filler to be dumped at the first opportunity. But in a must-follow game with a trump suit, low cards are levers. The moment you're void in the led suit, the humblest trump in your hand outranks their proudest ace — play a trump from another suit at the right moment and a two or a three flips control of the hand your way. A low trump that steals a trick doesn't just win those cards; it hands your team the lead, and in partnership trick-taking, the lead decides what everyone else at the table is allowed to do next.
So read your hand for voids and near-voids, not just for honours. A short suit is a door: two cards gone and suddenly every lead in that suit is a capture opportunity for your smallest trump. Manage the timing with your partner in mind — stealing a trick your partner was already winning helps nobody — and remember the team only needs seven. Thirteen is glory. Seven is the game.
The daily deal arrives at midnight, the same round for everyone. Learn Shpella and you'll carry a game almost nobody at any table has heard of. That's its own kind of treasure, and it's exactly the kind this site was built to keep alive.