Euchre or
eucre is a
trick-taking card game most commonly played with four people in two partnerships with a deck of 24, or sometimes 32, standard
playing cards. It is the game responsible for introducing the
joker into modern packs; this was invented around 1860 to act as a top trump or best bower (from the German word
Bauer, "farmer", denoting also the
jack). It is believed to be closely related to the French game
Écarté that was popularized in the United States by the
Cornish and
Pennsylvania Dutch, and to the seventeenth-century game of bad repute
Loo. It may be sometimes referred to as
Knock Euchre to distinguish it from
Bid Euchre.