Bourre or Boo-Ray is a trick based card game originating in Louisiana.

It is similar in play to Spades and Euchre. Like many card games the rules vary from game to game.

A typical Bourre game goes like this.

An ante is placed into the pot by all players. The dealer deals 5 cards to each player. After dealing and before looking at his cards, the dealer is flips face up one of his cards to determine the trump suite that will be used by everyone during the game. At this point each of the players decide in a clockwise fashion starting just left of the dealer if they are in, out, or check. Once a single player is in, the check option is no longer available. Players that drop are out for the duration of this particular game which could be many hands. Players that remain in are allowed to draw new cards by discarding a like number. Due to the deck only having 52 cards, a game of 7 allows each player to draw 2 and a game of 6 allows each player to draw 3. If there are 5 or fewer players, each player can draw up to 5 cards. Once the draw is complete, the player to the left of the dealer starts the game by leading a card. The next player must play a card of the same suite if he has one, otherwise he can "throw off" another suit or "trump" the played suite. The highest card of the led suite wins the trick unless trump cards are played. If trump cards are played, the highest trump card would win the trick. Aces are the highest cards and 2's are the lowest. Any player not winning a single trick must match the pot. Any player winning three tricks wins the pot. If one ore more players match the pot, the game continues even if someone gets 3 tricks since this money replaces the pot. If no one gets 3 tricks to win the game, a round a ante's occurs and another game is dealt by the person on the left of the dealer. The deal rotates in a clockwise rotation. The game ends when two players remain and one player gets 3 or 4 ticks and the other player gets 1 or 2 tricks.

Remaining goals are as follows: * Complete the game engine and run simulations using various styles of play to determine winning statistics * Log these statistics to a mysql database * Build a user interface on top of the game and be able to play on an iphone and website. * If you are a UI specialist and are interested in contributing to this project, please let me know.

This project is being developed using Java (JDK 1.6) with a Maven 2 build environment.