Section 2: The Deck
Required Equipment
Euchre requires one deck containing 24 cards. Make the Euchre deck from a standard French-suited pack by retaining the ace, king, queen, jack, ten, and nine of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Remove every other card before play. The cards should have indistinguishable backs and be complete enough that no card can be identified while face down.
Trump Ranking
In the trump suit, cards rank from highest to lowest as follows:
- Right bower: jack of the trump suit
- Left bower: jack of the other suit of the same color
- Ace of trump
- King of trump
- Queen of trump
- Ten of trump
- Nine of trump
The left bower changes suit for the entire hand. If hearts are trump, for example, the jack of diamonds is a heart, not a diamond. A player holding it must treat it as a heart when following suit. The diamond suit then contains only its ace, king, queen, ten, and nine.
Non-Trump Ranking
In every non-trump suit, cards ordinarily rank ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine from highest to lowest. The exception is the suit that supplied the left bower: its jack has moved into trump and is no longer available in its printed suit.
A trump card beats every non-trump card. If no trump is played to a trick, the highest card of the suit led wins. Cards from other non-trump suits cannot win, regardless of rank. For example, an ace of clubs cannot beat a nine of hearts when hearts were led unless clubs is trump.
Card Care and Preparation
Count the deck before beginning and whenever an irregularity is suspected. There must be exactly six printed ranks in each of the four suits. Shuffle thoroughly between hands so that previous combinations do not remain together. Any replacement deck should be introduced between hands, not during an active hand unless the current cards are unusable.