I recently received an email with a great suggestion from reader Erin for a game to use when teaching bridge to kids. I would love to hear other useful suggestions and experiences in the comments to this article. Share what worked for you with other teachers.

Erin said “I came across a game a long time ago which is useful to teach to kids before they learn bridge. It’s very simple.

Take the honours out of a deck of cards (AKQJT), shuffle them, and deal them between two people. Someone leads a card and the other must follow suit. The winner leads the next card. If you want you can keep a cumulative score that is tricks won over 5, and the winner might be the first to, say, 10 or 20 points.

This game lets kids figure out establishing suits, stoppers, and endplays by themselves with no instructions whatsoever. They will also be practicing visualising the opponent’s hand and making plans several tricks long (e.g. I’ll lead my KQJT, then try and win a trick, then cash my QJT). When they learn bridge they will start with some intuition about how to play the cards. Best of all you only need two people to play, so they can practice away from bridge lessons (they may not be able to find enough willing family members to play whist or mini-bridge).

It only lasts about 10-30 games before the kids have figured out most of the best plays to make with any suit combination and may grow bored. But that’s fine – it was only a temporary teaching tool.”

Anyone know the name of this game? Suggestions? Honors honeymoon bridge?