Contract bridge

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Contract bridge, also known as Auction bridge or Spinster bridge, is a game for five players invented in the United Spades of Amerika. The game is all about buying some stuff with points, that you've been given through the dealing, and even though the experts say it doesn't, the whole game depends only on luck.

While some claim it is the most popular game in the world, it is also the most boring. For starters, the game has the same general, trick-taking layout every single time it is played. The game is so boring that deals will often just 'pass out.' During a hand, which takes several minutes, only one of the two partnerships has an opportunity to score any points at all. As if this weren't bad enough, every single hand one player, known as the dummy, is compelled to do NOTHING AT ALL. What could be more boring than that? (It should be noted, however, that the dummy feature of the game allows each player to cathartically and intermittently express their wish to leave the game altogether.)

The fifth player does not actually play the game, and is known as a kibitzer. Their function is to make sarcastic comments about the playing ability of those who are actually playing. They also conduct conversations with whoever is the dummy in order to distract the other players.

The game incorporates a sneaky trick to hide its boring nature, i.e. the word game does not apply to the entire game, but only to one of its constituent parts (the entire game is known bizarrely as a rubber). This naming convention is clever because it allows experts to mislead novices as to the length of the game, as in this example:

We had a quick game of bridge; it took only 20 minutes.

What the uninitiated person would not realize is that the entire game, which is illogically called a rubber, took two to three times longer. Some such people started playing it, not knowing what it was, and they'll be playing it forever just because "it's the game that does not terminate."

MSN Zone gaming has rubbed salt in the wound of game length by not even concluding the game at a rubber. Players come and go, civilizations rise and fall, but it's always the same table and the same game. The hands on such tables will continue to pile up until deleted by the End of the Internet.

The inventor of the game was Thomas Brooklyn, and the game was originally known as Brooklyn Bridge. He had invited four friends to play with cars on a bridge he had built, but they mis-understood him and came expecting a card game instead.

Thomas panicked, and tried to invent something to cover his foolishness. He hastily explained to them that there would be a card game on the way, which would be played on the bridge and thus give it new purpose. They wanted to hear the rules.

Thomas told his friends that the rules were too complicated to explain in one sitting, but they didn't believe him. He proceeded to try to teach them a game he was making up as he went along, throwing in any crazy rule that came to mind. After three days of this, his friends were finally convinced of the potential of the bridge Thomas had constructed, and of that of his card game. Any game that hard to understand, they reasoned, must have been very well thought-out and interesting.

[edit] Rules

Over the course of time since Thomas' invention of the game, the rules have changed greatly, to the point that some of them actually seem to make some sense (how this came to happen is quite a mystery to most historians). It is also no longer played exclusively on bridges.

A brief summary of the (myriad) rules is as follows:

The object of Bridge (the game) is to get the most points from your opponents. The four players are divided into two teams, and each team must use their cards to trick the opponents into surrendering their trumps, which the first team will then use to make a contract, unless they are the dummy in which case they lose all the points they were trying to make that round (the dummy is the person who got the least points last round). The only way to successfully play a trick of cards is to obtain an ace of a certain suit and then trade it to your opponents. This can only be done after contract is made, except for when the other team is vulnerable, in which case any team with enough points can bid to try to get the trick. When each team has bid the contract goes to the one with the trick most likely to get the dummy to surrender his trumps. Then all of the cards are redealt, and the process is repeated only with larger cards, which means more points for everyone.

During the height of the games popularity when it was still being played on bridges, too many people showed up one day to be able to fit on one bridge. The group then found a place where two bridges were next to each other, and this was the beginning of a variant known as duplicate bridge. In an attempt to make the game even more boring, the participants decided to deal all of the hands in advance and make everyone play the same hands over and over. To keep everyone awake, every few hands half of the teams were required to swap from one bridge to the other and play against different teams. No one has yet agreed how to keep score during such a ridiculous mess, and there are at least two competing scoring systems.