What is contract bridge?
Bridge is a trick-taking card game for four players, played with a standard 52-card deck. The four players sit at North, East, South and West, and form two fixed partnerships: North and South play as one side, East and West as the other. Partners sit opposite each other and win or lose together. In Bridge Gym you always play the South seat, with North as your partner.
Each player is dealt 13 cards, and a full hand of bridge plays out exactly 13 tricks — every card gets played exactly once. Before the play starts, the two sides bid against each other in an auction to decide the contract: how many tricks one side is promising to win, and whether one suit will count as trumps. Once the contract is set, the side that won the auction tries to make good on it; the other side defends, trying to stop them.
Tricks and trumps
A trick is one round of play: four cards, one from each player in turn, going clockwise around the table. The highest card of the suit that was led wins the trick — unless someone plays a trump, which beats every card of every other suit. Whoever wins a trick leads the next one.
The contract can name one suit as trumps for the whole hand, or specify no trumps at all (written NT), in which case the highest card of the suit led always wins. A contract also sets a level: level 1 promises 7 of the 13 tricks, level 3 promises 9, and so on — six tricks are assumed as a baseline, so the level is how many more than six you're committing to win.
One player from the side that won the auction becomes declarer and plays two hands: their own, and their partner's. As soon as the first card is led, declarer's partner's hand — the dummy — is laid face up on the table for everyone to see, and declarer chooses which of those cards to play as well as their own. The two players on the other side are the defenders, trying to win enough tricks between them to stop the contract being made.
Why minibridge is the on-ramp
The bidding auction is the part that puts most beginners off — it's a whole extra skill, layered on top of the card play, before you've had a chance to get comfortable with tricks and trumps at all. Minibridge strips that away: there's no competitive auction. Instead, each player simply announces how many points their hand is worth, the stronger side becomes declarer, and declarer picks the contract after seeing the dummy hand face up.
That means you can learn everything about winning tricks, drawing trumps, finessing and the rest of real declarer play before you ever have to learn a single bidding convention. It's the recommended way in, and it's exactly where Bridge Gym's own lessons start.
How Bridge Gym teaches it
Bridge Gym's guided Learn path runs in four stages, each one a short, hands-on lesson rather than a page of rules to read:
- Stage 0 — the fundamentals: winning a trick, and the one rule that shapes every trick, following suit.
- Stage 1 — a full 13-card hand, and how a trump suit lets even a low card beat an ace.
- Stage 2 — your first complete Minibridge hand: announce your points, see who declares, choose a contract, and play it through.
- Stage 3 — two real ACOL bidding conventions, Stayman and transfers, played out over a genuine auction (see ACOL bidding for what those mean).
Every lesson uses the real bidding and play engine — not a scripted read-along — with hints whenever you're unsure of a call or a card. Once you've been through the lessons, the practice scenarios put the same skills to work on fresh hands, each one graded by a double-dummy solver with a hint ladder that nudges you toward the right line rather than just giving the answer away. A built-in glossary covers every term along the way.
Bridge Gym is free, needs no account or sign-up, and works as an installable Progressive Web App that keeps working fully offline once it's loaded — on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop, for a complete beginner or someone brushing up before a real game.