The first one isn't a weaker version of the others — it plays the way people play before somebody explains what a void is for.
Every table plays a slightly different game and each of them will tell you theirs is the real one.
Everything on this screen happened in front of you. Nothing on it was worked out.
The rules take a minute. The five things underneath them take a few hands, and they are what the game is.
Thirteen cards each. Before each hand you pass three — left, then right, then across, then a hand where you pass nothing, and round again. Whoever holds the two of clubs leads it. Follow suit if you can; highest card of the led suit takes the trick and leads the next.
Every heart is worth a point and the queen of spades is worth thirteen. Lowest score when somebody passes the target wins. No points may be played on the first trick, and hearts cannot be led until somebody has discarded one.
Every trick you take is a risk and nothing else. A hand full of aces is a bad hand. This inverts every instinct from every other card game, and it takes about three hands to stop fighting it.
When you must follow suit, play the highest card that still loses. Not the lowest — the highest that loses. Throwing your two away early leaves you holding it when it is the only card you have, and being forced to win a trick you did not want is how hearts is actually lost.
A suit you cannot follow is a suit you can throw anything into — the queen, your high hearts, whatever hurts most. That is what the pass is for: you are not getting rid of dangerous cards, you are buying an empty suit. Passing your two highest diamonds when you only have three is worth far more than passing two aces.
If you hold her you want spades led by somebody else, and you want to be void when it happens. If you don't, every spade you play above the jack is a bet that she is already gone. Small spades are protection — keep them.
Take all twenty-six and everybody else takes twenty-six instead of you. It is why you cannot simply duck everything: if one player has taken every point so far, somebody has to break it up, and it will cost whoever does. Watching for it is what makes the last four tricks worth playing rather than just finishing.
The eye in the tray shows what each seat has taken, because everybody watched those tricks. It does not show which hearts are still out, because working that out is the game. The opponents play by the same rule: they remember every suit you failed to follow — which happened in front of everybody — and nothing they could not have seen.
One phone is the table and reads out four letters; the others type them. Every phone is sent only its own hand — not the whole game with the other hands hidden in the interface, but a message that does not contain them at all. A check in the repository proves it by shuffling the three unseen hands and requiring the message to come back identical.